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A review by sophronisba
Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell
3.0
I still think this series is interesting and worth your time -- I am still planning to reread it in a few years! But. Honestly I am getting kind of tired of the unrelenting maleness of this series. For which I cannot really fault Anthony Powell (who was, after all, male) and yet there it is. None of the women feel real and it strikes me as odd that the viewpoint character has a great deal to say about his former school chums whom he no longer knows well, but almost nothing of his wife and children.
I was thinking about this because my other reading project this year is Dickens, who also has a very specific male point-of-view, and it does seem to me that over time, Dickens develops more complicated and interesting female characters and even seems to begin to understand that women have their own interior lives (if only he had applied that observation to his own wife). But Powell doesn't seem to have that evolution, at least in this series. Of course Powell had a very different project and you could argue that, like Jane Austen, he is painting with a fine brush on a two inches of ivory. Still, I do begin to find it irksome.
I was thinking about this because my other reading project this year is Dickens, who also has a very specific male point-of-view, and it does seem to me that over time, Dickens develops more complicated and interesting female characters and even seems to begin to understand that women have their own interior lives (if only he had applied that observation to his own wife). But Powell doesn't seem to have that evolution, at least in this series. Of course Powell had a very different project and you could argue that, like Jane Austen, he is painting with a fine brush on a two inches of ivory. Still, I do begin to find it irksome.