T.S. Eliot's "In my beginning is my end" is where the contrast throws light on             Anthony Powell. Recollecting the genesis of Dance in his autobiography, he writes: "Certain technical matters had to be settled at once for early establishment of a sufficiently broad base at the start from which a complex narrative might arise, fan out; be sustained over a period of years." So to understand the end of the dance, we have to go back to the beginning.  

In the first book, A Question of Upbringing, we meet four young men. They are at that awkward age between adolescence and manhood. They are mature, but not men.  They are inmates of the same house at their boarding school which is precisely described — the most accurate rendering of the famous school in literature — but never named. Three are friends who mess together; that is, share a tea-time meal with companions of their choice. The fourth boy is a bit older, not part of the mess. He is first seen by the narrator emerging out of the Thames Valley mist, earnestly training for sports at which he will never shine. He is unattractive, has no sense of humour and while too senior to be bullied is somewhat a figure of fun. The three friends are not snobbish exactly. They are more interested in the fact that one of them has just lost his virginity on a supposed trip to the dentist in London. But they live in an age — we are in the early 1920s-acutely aware of social nuance. Jenkins's and Templer's folk are professionals, military and financial respectively. Stringham's are rackety and posh, also divorced. There is something subtly off-key about Widmerpool. He has already passed into mythic legend by wearing the wrong kind of coat. Colonel Cobb would have been riveted.  

Once again, anyone hearing this introduction who had not read the novels might well think they were in for social comedy, very English social comedy at that. But look how things will fan out, to use Powell's phrase, for these four young men; look how the Fates, as in ancient epic or tragedy, will reel them in. Jenkins's most significant love affair, before his marriage, will be with Templer's sister. Widmerpool's success in business will cease to make him a figure of fun for Templer; he finds employment for the sister's estranged husband, thereby bringing the couple together again and wrecking Jenkins's romance. Indirectly, through Templer's first wife, who has left him for a left-wing intellectual met by Nick at university, Jenkins encounters the girl he at once knows he will marry. He is the only one of the four who will have a long, stable and happy marriage with children: the emotional base for his creativity.  Stringham is a figure of classic melancholy; very attractive, endlessly entertaining. He can mime Widmerpool perfectly. He dislikes, and sees through, school, university, his family, work, marriage, life. He becomes an alcoholic and then a recovering alcoholic, no less an affliction. But he is also the tragic hero of Dance. He enlists in the ranks for the war and finds himself a mess waiter in Jenkins's and Widmerpool's regiment.  The latter avoids embarrassment by arranging for him to be shipped to Singapore and therefore, indirectly, to a Japanese war camp and his death. "Awfully chic", as he puts it, "to be killed."

Stringham has a niece: a poisonous, pretty child who throws up into a font at his wedding. She will turn into the man-killing vampire of the novels, Pamela Flitton. She seduces and humiliates Templer, causing him to volunteer for what turns out to be, in the context of war again, a suicide mission.  She marries Widmerpool so that he can provide her with a convenient base from which to make violent sexual raids on other people's lives, notably Jenkins's admired writer friend X.Trapnel. She is a kindly one, a Fury. She governs much of Dance's mythological sub-structure.  She is drawn, just a little of course, from the real-life figure of Barbara Skelton, author of a wonderfully named memoir, Tears Before Bedtime. I once asked a friend of mine, who had had an affair with Barbara Skelton, what was the secret of her appeal. "The tawny skin", he replied, "and the cruelty." The art of the novel, as exemplified by Dance, is to create characters at once realistic, idiosyncratic and emblematic: like Hamlet, say, or Ophelia. You grasp their narrative or structural significance. But you must also be able to recognise them should they walk into the room. In theory, it is far-fetched to marry your two gargoyles to each other. In practice, the gratification for someone who looks like Widmerpool, and is so concerned with the figure he cuts in the world, of marrying a knock-out like Pamela is altogether convincing.