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everyone called him) overdid it absurdly. He forgot to mention that the whole sequence is an almost unbroken stretch of genius.
    New readers should be warned, however, that there is the occasional dull stretch. At the opening of volume 6 ( The Kindly Ones ) there is far too much about servants,ghosts, and the occult. Defending himself against charges that he was too interested in Burke’s Peerage , Powell once said that he would have been equally interested in a book called Burke’s Workers . But the truth was that the toffs, or would-be toffs, were what he was best at. And no writer dedicated to showing life as it is should give even fleeting acknowledgment to the occult. The real reason why Scorpio Murtlock, the sinister, hippie-ish cult leader in the last volume, is such an unlikely figure is that Powell gives him a measure of the telepathic power that he claims, whereas in fact the typical counterculture hero was a fake. Evelyn Waugh would not have been fooled for a minute. Nor, probably, would Olivia Manning.
    But the really serious fault in Powell’s masterpiece is the absence of Americans. In those volumes set in the years between the wars, this absence is already glaring: Mrs. Simpson is allowed to make a fleeting, nameless appearance, but really the rich women of America had for a long time been making inroads into British high society. And in wartime, in Powell’s nostalgically remembered London full of foreign uniforms, the absence of American uniforms threatens to turn the whole thing into a fantasy. The shift of power in the direction of the Americans was, after all,a talking point even at the time. Powell’s disinclination to even mention it gives the effect of a protective mechanism, a consolation for loss. Powell had a firm understanding of politics: he knew that things would never be the same again. Perhaps he wrote the whole majestic sequence in order to palliate his regret. Like the ruins of an abbey, there is something forlorn about its beauty, an air of desolation that make you glad you have paid the visit, but just as glad not to be staying long. Even its laughter tastes of salt tears.
    Though Powell sometimes piled on the subtlety to the point of flirting with the evanescent, he made every other writer purporting to deal with the sweep of British society look crass. This especially applied to C. P. Snow. Snow’s novels about the corridors of power (the completed sequence of eleven volumes was called Strangers and Brothers ) got their grip on the public in the 1950s, a decade before Powell’s voice became the established tone in which to talk about the Establishment. (Significantly, the word “Establishment,” with its overtones of time-tested authority, came into wide use only as Britain’s role as an international administrative system was wound up.) When I was still a student at Sydney University in the late 1950s, to knowabout Snow’s novels was a mark of sophistication. I tried to read them then, and found them so traumatically boring that I can’t see myself giving them another try even now. (Part Two: A Decision Is Taken. Chapter One: The Lighting of a Cigarette. It’s all like that.) Snow’s narrator, Lewis Eliot, talks with the infallibly misplaced emphasis of Powell’s Widmerpool. Snow never quite realized that his own pomp and success added up to a comic turn. He was like a walking illustration by Osbert Lancaster, whose name, to me, is still very much alive. All this being said, however, I have noticed that the Penguin volumes of Snow’s novels keep cropping up in clusters on Hugh’s bookstall. I can just see the moment—though I slightly dread it—when I start assembling a set. But even if they turn out to be more substantial than I once thought, I doubt that those Snow novels that have the academic cloisters for an ambience will be up to the mark later set by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, or even by Tom Sharpe. The academic novel is a genre, and a genre needs to be