Customer Reviews
An excellent start - By: Junius, 04 Oct 2008 
This is the first of a splendid series of novels, dealing with the youth of what are to become the central characters; Jenkins, Templar, Quiggin, Members, Stringham & Widmerpool. We see clues to their future development; notably Widmerpool's manipulative nature & lust for power. If you have only seen the TV version, as good as it is, it is highly abbreviated & misses out the French episode. It is a pleasure to read, & never seems too long.
A little something to whet the appetite... - By: dukesdenver, 10 Feb 2008 
As the first of a 12-book sequence Powell can be forgiven for not packing this book with action. Instead we meander pleasurably through Jenkins' years of education & are given the first tempting insights into the characters that surround him.
I would have given this 5 stars but for the poor quality binding. Horrid stiff covers & pages coming loose at the bottom after just one reading.
Persevere, enter its world, the rewards are great - By: Philip Spires, 05 Nov 2007 A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell's "A Question of Upbringing" is the first part of his mammoth twelve novel epic "A Dance to the Music of Time". He writes with wit, humour & not a little sarcasm, describing a quintessential Englishness that perhaps was never representative of the society & has, arguably, disappeared. He wrote this first volume in 1951 and, though the book starts with a London scene from that era, the majority of the book deals with the characters' school & university experiences & recallls a time passed.
The main character is Jenkins. I will follow the author's lead & use surnames only for males, surnames plus titles for married, older or otherwise unavailable women, & Christian names for eligible women, whether they be of a certain class or prone to wear flowery dresses while standing next to post boxes in the street. As his friend, Stringham, discovered, even some of the surname plus title women at times can prove highly eligible.
The book's form is both simple & intriguing. It is so effective we almost miss the ingenuity of its construction. There are just four chapters, each in excess of fifty pages & each focused on one particular episode. We have school, a social gathering, a holiday in France & college undergraduate life. Powell's writing has such a lightness of touch that we forget how intensely we are invited to analyse the circumstances of each chapter & how penetratingly we discover the characters' lives. There is considerable innuendo, much gossip & usuallly piles of money, along with social status & influence wrapped up in every household.
The quintessence of their Englishness, like characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, arises out of their apparent inability to question - or perhaps even notice - their privilege. It's a state they inhabit without either reflection or gratitude, so much taken for granted that it lies beyond doubt, its achievement apparently assumed, not expected. School means one of the better "public" schools. Going "up to university" assumes Oxbridge as a right, though Powell tinges this with the perennial blight of the English upper classes, intellectual paucity, by having several of his keen entrants "decide" not to complete a degree. One assumes that many of the others will take thirds before assuming their company chairs or ministerial portfolios. The army figures large in family histories, always at officer class, of course, & so does the City, where one can always become "something". Even Americans, however, can be described as having "millionaire pedigree" on both sides, an economic status that presumably compensates for what is otherwise a palpable lack of breeding. When family members do not assume expected & assumed heights, they are referred to in hushed tones, the words "black sheep" perhaps not politicallly or at least sociallly correct even then.
But if this reallly was a quintessence of Englishness, it was a pretty rare ingredient. Maybe one or two per cent of the population went to the right school. Only about five or six per cent attended higher education of any sort, let alone a university one "went up to". Neither Sandhurst nor corporate board rooms were populated by the masses. (They still aren't!) And so this was a quintessence of separateness, of rarefied heights in an extended class system and, certainly by the 1950s, some of these peaks had been scaled by other aspirants, using new climbing techniques eschewed by the incumbents of years.
And so "A Question of Upbringing" reveals its duality. It's a tale that celebrates a time lost, a nostalgic peek into a remembered adolescence where a hand placed apparently carelessly & always momentarily upon that of a member of the opposite sex remained a daring highpoint of teenage years.
Nostalgia is always tinged with loss, however. Early in the book, Powell describes the school thus: "Silted-up residues of the years smouldered interruptedly - & not without melancholy - in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles & archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic & inconsolable, among water-meadows & avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence."
And how about this for a presumption of affluence: "It was a rather gloomy double-fronted façade in a smalll street near Berkeley Square: the pillars of the entrance flanked on either side with hollow cones for the linkmen to extinguish their torches." And we notice we are in a different age when Powell has his lads pick up two girls off the street to joy-ride in a new Vauxhalll. Without a suggestion of tongue-in-cheek or indeed relish he can write that: "The girls could not have made more noise if they had been having their throats cut."
When I first read Anthony Powell, I could not get past my ingrained hatred of this class & its power-assuming, wealth-inheriting inhabitants. It was a country that was not mine. I come to it now a little wiser & a little richer myself, richer in experience at least, & now I can appreciate the irony that my previous naivety ignored. I now look forward with some relish to the next eleven episodes. "A Dance to the Music of Time" is certainly a masterpiece to be revisited.
The most overrated series of novels ever? - By: Edward Matthews, 26 Sep 2007 
Young fogey Jenkins (the worlds most aged teenager) narrates his uneventful life in Eton & Oxford. Devoid of much emotional or intellectual life, shielded from history (though not class prejuduce), he manages a few witty character observations before a boring holiday in France & a flat ending. How anyone makes it to book 2 (let alone book 12) is beyond me.
Comparisons with Joyce & Proust are excruciatingly wide of the mark. Waugh is a genius in comparison with this minor effort (this books "literary" merit seems miniscule to me). Powell has a witty eye & captures some speech well, but the book is flabby, dated & poorly structured.
Slow introduction to a literary wonderland - By: 100wordreviewer, 03 Apr 2007 "A Question of Upbringing" is the first volume in Anthony Powell's 12-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time". The latter is a kind of English "A la Recherche du Temps perdu" - an elegaic look back across a life stretching through much of 20thC English history, teeming with fascinating & entertaining characters.
Unfortunately, "A Question of Upbringing" is a bit slow, & lacks much of the humour of later volumes. Not much happens: the narrator goes to school, then university. He has a frustrated romantic encounter in France & we meet key characters who will resurface later. But it's worth persevering, because the next few volumes (see my reviews!) are much better, & infinitely funnier.
Pros: gentle introduction to a masterpiece. Cons: a bit dull, though elegant in parts.
