Dance to the Music of Time - has anyone read all of them?

[MrsMuddle]

Don't know much about the DTTMOT books. I think it's either a love/hate thing with them. Would be interested to hear both viewpoints, before I decide whether to spend most of 2008 ploughing through them.

I have read them all twice. The first time in my early twenties. I loved them. In fact I may even have read them more than once in a short space of time. I read them again in my mid-thirties and wasn't nearly so keen. I don't think I minded the snobbishness so much the first time. But I think you should read them.

Thanks. What time span do they cover? Is it a family saga?

I'm on the hate side. Only got through the first few chapters. Those sentences that go on for pages....Couldn't bear it. But obviously this is a real marmite book.

Channel 4 boiled the whole lot down to a really quite good mini-series and IIRC did not leave much plot out
I think they should be read too but agree they are Marmite books par excellence and would not blame anyone for avoiding them
Rather like Proust, really

I love them; I'm on the third cycle. The 'Dance' is the characters moving away and back again, in different relationships with each other, getting married and divorced. I believe there are over 300 in the whole series. There are lots of long descriptions of society parties - but you also see society changing from the 1920s, through WW2, to the 70s.

You don;t need to spend all 2008 reading them - I reckon I spent 3 years or more the first time through. When you come across a character from a previous book, it is like meeting an old friend.

DH has the books on the shelf waiting to be read when he has enough time to read them all in one flow. He saw the series and read part of the first one and loved it, then got sent overseas to work so never got to finish them. I've been meaning to read them myself. Might just start reading them now myself and beat him to it .

have started first one but not got v far. feel need long block of time to get to grips with them. there was a radio 4 programme with very different people citing it as their favourite book including the guy who wrote the Rebus books and the geneticist Steve Jones.

Dear God - who wrote it, i need them all right now. It's not Olivia Manning is it? I'm a bit of a 'completist' (read anal retentive...)

Help - I've been reading PG Wodehouse & Agatha Christie for the last 3 years (only at bedtime, honestly) for the 'period detail, yeh,I'm fibbing............

Also love very much, probably in the biblical sense, given a tea dress and a time machine, Paul (?) Scott who wrote the Raj Quartet. Is dttmot similar in the sense of 'time & epochs passing' (what a prat I am)?

Anthony Powell. Olivia Manning wrote the Balkans Trilogy. (Damn you Bendi, now I'm going to have to read those too as you've mentioned her ). I've been reading loads of Agatha Christie too but always feel really disappointed with her writing. PG Wodehouse is fabulous. Currently reading all the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories so am possibly also a bit of a completist...

mumbeump - it's like talking in the mirror, wonderful. I heard that there was a thing on TV about Agatha Christie that explained that the way she constucted her short, dialogue heavy sentences was hypnotic & induced torpor. Guess what - it does. 'Murder on the Links' got me through the first 7 hours of labour & I've not dared read anything else in bed since. Thank God she wrote 82 books - DS might be in Uni before I get thru' the damned cycle again...

Thanks for Anthony Powell, I'll look out for, but wasn't he a dreadful old misogynist drunk? I seem to have one of those '1,000,000 books you must read before your breakfast' volumes that gave hime a dreadful write up?

Anyhooo.. just be careful of the light pulls in the dark - may be a snaaa - aaargh.....

And Wodehouse was a fascist apparently. I'm sure that lots of artists are horrid people in real life. Separate the man from his work and just enjoy the books.

Both DH and I have read all of Dance to the Music of Time and we liked it so much that we named DS1 after the narrator! The title of the series is an allusion to the Poussin painting of that name. The first page of the first book (the road menders and is probably the best writing in the whole of the book. I loved the war time volumes (but I also loved Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy and tend to get the two muddled up). The C4 series was too short to do it justice. There was an excellent Radio 4 adaptation back in the 1980s. Some of the characters were based on real people but I would love to know who was the basis for Widmerpool?

I read them all many years ago on my long London commutes - and loved them. I mourned when I had read the last one. And funnily enough, my father and I were talking about them today; he said, oh it's very fashionable to despise them now, but I think they are better than that, and I think that's true. It is as close as you will get to living someone else's entire life in a book (or few).

And yes, who was Widmerpool?!

Clicked on this because I was interested, then realised it is the thread I started! It's dropped off my "threads I'm on" list, and I hadn't realised it was still ongoing.

Thanks for all your opinions. I have a pile of books to get through, but will definitely add this series to my mental to-read list.

Most authors claim their characters are amalgams of people they have met; there is, inevitably, a web site detailing possible models for the characters in Dance: anthonypowell.org.uk/dance/dancewho.htm. Widmerpool is allegedly based on Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn.

Mumdebump: Wodehouse was NOT a Fascist. He was living in France when the Nazis invaded, he and his wife tried to escape but their car broke down and he was arrested and imprisioned in Upper Silesia. He was accused of collaborating after he gave a radio broadcast shortly before his release saying that he had been well treated by the Germans during imprisionment. He was naive rather than collaborative; he was due to be released anyway due to his age and he made the broadcast to reassure his friends that he was OK.

Returning to thread, I've tried to read the first book in the series but found it hard going. However, people I know assure me the series is wonderful and I'll give it another try one day.

I agree that the fascist label was unfair in Wodehouse's case. You only have to read how he sends up Lord Sidcup.

But he probably would have been first against the wall Come The Revolution, for being extremely un-socialist.