The second of twelve volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the first-person point of view narration of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he enters the social whirl of debutante parties in London, living on his own and making a start in his career as an editor of art books.

In the overall structure of the series, A Buyer’s Market is positioned in the middle of the first of four “movements,” after Nick has completed his schooling and university training, but before he has entered into any permanent relationships. It immediately follows A Question of Upbringing and precedes The Acceptance World.

In the first of four chapters, Nick presents his recollections of Mr. Deacon, a bad painter fond of the company of young men. These memories crop up when Nick discovers four of Mr. Deacon’s paintings at a rummage sale. The paintings’ influences fix them in Time—always capitalized in this kind of context—and also turn back the clock and the narration to the days of Nick’s youth.

These memories lead his thoughts to a house he liked to visit long ago; one of Mr. Deacon’s paintings hung there, but more important, there Nick would be likely to encounter the first young lady ever to turn his head, Barbara Goring, best friend of Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. These girls are presented to the social world as debutantes soon after Nicholas has finished college and moved to London.

Anthony Powell

The social whirl of London in the 1920s forms the core of the novel, during an era when the Great War—World War I—has carried off too many eligible young men, leaving a buyer’s market for those who remain.

Barbara Goring, a boisterous young lady, is elevated to feminine perfection in Nick’s mind by his infatuation with her. The novel recounts the building and unbuilding of this state of a young man’s mind as Nick floats into a sentimental obsession for Barbara. He mistakes this state of mind for his first adult love attachment before he is disabused of his crush by the young lady herself.

After a particularly disastrous party, Nick learns that Kenneth Widmerpool, the tragicomic villain of the entire series, has been suffering the same emotional crush for Barbara that he himself has been experiencing, in circumstances that make the discovery a privately hilarious relief.

From the formalities of the ballroom, the story quickly shifts to a “low party” at Mrs. Milly Andriadis’s at the invitation of Charles Stringham, Mrs. Andriadis’s temporary paramour. Where the debutante ball had been populated by young people and their graying parents, this bohemian party is filled with adults, including a visiting prince from a Levantine country with desirable raw materials and the business tycoon Sir Magnus Donners.

The two events on the same evening suggest the transition that Nick is undergoing as he leaves the preoccupations of youth behind and takes up his adult role. His general unpreparedness is indicated by the way he finds himself slipping off from an awkward moment at the party, but in the next chapter he is once again in the presence of many of the same characters at Stourwater, the home of Sir Magnus Donners.

Adult life—life in general—is more complicated than he had previously thought, requiring him to adjust quickly.

Soon afterward, he finds himself at the wedding of Charles Stringham and Peggy Stepney, the first ceremony to signal the official transformation of Nick’s generation into full adult status. Mr. Deacon dies that day, completing the design of Powell’s dance. By the novel’s end, Nick is an independent adult, aware of the rapidly rising stakes in the game of life.

Bibliography

Joyau, Isabelle. Understanding Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Selig, Robert L. Time and Anthony Powell. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Spurling, Hillary. Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 20th-century novels, A Buyer's Market, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, Anthony Powell novel summary, Anthony Powell's A Buyer's Market, art and memory in literature, Barbara Goring, bohemian London, British Literature, British upper class fiction, Charles Stringham, coming-of-age novel, debutante culture, English fiction chronology, English social satire, historical fiction UK, interwar London, Kenneth Widmerpool, literary analysis, literary series, London in the 1920s, modernist fiction, Mr. Deacon, Mrs. Milly Andriadis, Nicholas Jenkins, Peggy Stepney, post-WWI fiction, postwar British class, Powell's narrative style, roman-fleuve, sentimental obsession, Sir Magnus Donners, Stourwater