Fiona Cutts meets Trapnell's necrophiliac biographer at one of Murtlock's ritual orgies and bids fair to become the respectable wife of a now respectable academic. Widmerpool's quasi-heroic will to get on, his uncontemplated desire and pursuit of some illusory whole, has led him to embrace the counter-culture of Abbie Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse and Powell's own fictional French guru, Léon Josef Ferrand-Seneschal. This nightmare figure not only involves Widmerpool in "liberated" sexual high jinks, but nearly gets him indicted for treason.  The apostle of liberty is feeding stuff to the Soviet Union as busily as he can.  If you are very blinkered, you can read the whole of Dance as a satire on the rightthinkmanship of the Left: tendence John Carey and other spiritual heirs of Quiggin.  The extremity, therefore, of Widmerpool's quest, the lengths he will go to or not stop at to realise what General Conyers (almost my favourite minor character in Dance) would have called his personal myth does have a touch of the heroic about it. Indeed, the hyper-literate Jenkins compares him mentally to Ariosto's Orlando, Childe Roland of the Romances. Like Orlando, when he drops out, he does so with a vengeance: the reverse epitome of cool, of doing your own thing.  As a fine later novelist, A.S. Byatt, put it: "The innocence of the Sixties flickers into cruelty very quickly."

Widmerpool has always answered to the imperatives or trends of a given day.  Now they will deliver him a ridiculous death. A well-known public man nearing 70, he has in Scorp Murtlock, as in Pamela, found a will stronger than his own. He dies offstage from the narrative, as Stringham and Templer have died. He is by now wholly grotesque: a diminished man in a blue nightie, participant in ritual orgies (he prefers looking) and forever tilting at the windmills of fashionable thought. The genesis of Wagner's immense Ring was a projected opera called The Death of Siegfried. Hearing Secret Harmonies immolates the anti-hero of Dance. We may think of it as The Death of Widmerpool.  

Proust and Powell both use the device of a party to bring their surviving characters on stage for the last time. In Le Temps Retrouvé, the afternoon party of the Princesse de Guermantes (Madame Verdurin to you and me and also to a confused Bloch) segues into a grotesque masked ball where old people have painted themselves up, as if old age had not already disguised them.  The awful Bloch looks like an old Shylock.  He is the same age as the Narrator, who is barely 50. In Harmonies, we meet Widmerpool on stage for the last time, creating acute embarrassment at a wedding. We meet the once bewitching Jean and the once loathsome Duport at a gallery exhibition one devoted to bad art. Mr Deacon has been fashionably rebranded by the young.  But all this, in both novels, is administration: theatrical "business" merely compared with the realisation of manifest artistic destiny for Proust and the tragi-comic Widmerpool's Tod for Powell. Powell also grasps that the job of the artist is to create association, generate metamorphosis, modify the world through an act of the mind. But his world, and Poussin's, is a bleak one; even though for my time and money Powell is the greatest comedian, the funniest writer I have read. The Theatre of the Absurd was big around the time Hearing Secret Harmonies was being composed, and it shows.  

Widmerpool's death strips Jenkins, sole survivor now of those four schoolboys, of a recurring figure in his life: "one of those fabulous monsters that haunts the recesses of the individual imagination." Life, and a novel orchestrating a life, delivers both the grotesque and the absurd. But these attributes have their heroic, and thereby their timeless, tragic aspects as well. There is not so much that is funny about Widmerpool's end. His heart stops when he sprints into the lead on one of Murtlock's group runs through the woods, a desperate attempt to assert himself over the young Magus. Harmonies is the most pastoral of the books, the most given to natural description, a direct reversal of the ordering of A La Recherche. The last run is more than contextually tidy; we met Widmerpool on a run at school and Nick, in his Aldershot childhood, used to observe Dr Trelawney and his robed followers running over the Surrey furze. But now the run reminds us that all we know of life is movement, striving, entropy, repetition.  Our ethical imperative is to run towards the wintry silence with honour, like Stringham, not vanity, like Widmerpool. Bithel, whose life in the army Widmerpool wrecked many books ago, acts as a melancholy Loge. He delivers the news of the death. All the survivor, the writer, knows for certain is that things happen and will happen again, seasons return and the dance go on.

This is the correct version of Grey Gowrie's text. In the print version of this article pages 68 and 69 were mistakenly transposed.