DANCE MARATHON.

British novelist Anthony Powell died last month at the age of ninety-four. Although not well known in the United States, Powell is regarded as one of his generation's best novelists, favorably compared to his contemporaries and acquaintances Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green. His reputation rests on his twelve-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time (University of Chicago), a witty, socially acute chronicle of the fate of the English upper class as it unfolded over the course of the past century.

As coincidence would have it, I finished reading Hearing Secret Harmonies (1986), the final volume of Dance--the first volume appeared in 1951--on the day Powell's obituary appeared. Powell outlived by years the better-known members of his literarily illustrious generation, not to mention the prominent political, social, and academic figures of twentieth-century British history. Dance has been mined by critics who treat the work as a roman a clef. Powell, however, was adamant that he alone created the characters in his labyrinthine opus. The great delight of Dance's length and style is the way in which those characters become a fictional society that any reader feels, well, privileged to enter.

Thousands of pages, seventy-five years in time, twenty-five years in composition: the simple details suggest the scope and the audacity of the program. Powell limits his range to that fictional terrain we are familiar with from so many British writers: Eton, Oxbridge, civil service, and the military, with the effects of the First World War everywhere apparent, and the coming of the Second World War the formative moment. The plot depends upon the emergence, withdrawal, and reemergence of a few key characters. The seasons and decades turn, some people die, some come back introduced by another who has no idea of a former friendship, old lovers appear on the arms of foreign generals, and the separation of meetings by thirty years makes juxtaposition of judgments inevitable. As the title Hearing Secret Harmonies suggests, there does seem to be a pattern to it all.

Consider the task Powell set himself: compose a work that is a form of fictional autobiography, and write it over the course of twenty-five years, taking it, if one looks to the future, where the writer has yet to live. All the perspectives are shifting as the narrator and his creator are themselves maturing. Style and viewpoints change, and the reader is made ever more aware of the effects of time on judgments, judgments that are trained on people who recur as partners in the dance of life. Nicholas Jenkins, Powell's narrator, is an extraordinary creation in his own right, especially in the way Powell creates a bond between the reader and Jenkins that seems almost like a collaboration as both uncover the patterns of the social dance, the changing fortunes of art, war, marriage, and industry that play out across Dance's vast canvas.

Dance takes its title from the Poussin painting that Powell sees as emblematic of his artistic vision: four nymphs dancing in a circle whose movements are both free yet coordinated. The allusions of the novel to painting, music, and literature bring a haunting sense that great works offer us forms, if not of understanding, of coincidental reflection. One of the work's extraordinary scenes occurs in Temporary Kings, the eleventh volume, when Jenkins visits Italy to attend a conference. The dance of time has assembled the familiar principals and the action--intrigue, scandal, changing sexual partners, and the looping entry of a new dancer--is prefigured in the ceiling painting of Candaules and Gyges by Tiepolo. Jenkins's unobtrusive reflections, for he is most often spectator to the dance, are wry and allusive: life lived within the sense of artistic pattern.

Before the chronicle ends there are a suicide, an international scandal, and Jenkins's own carefully qualified reporting of the testimony of those who claim to have been witnesses. This is all accomplished with brilliant satire, and in Pamela Widmerpool, another recurring central figure, Powell has created one of fiction's great female characters. Her latter-day husband, then widower, Kenneth Widmerpool, is the pivot, if any character can be, about which the epic swings. We follow Kenneth as school boy, student, lawyer, financier, soldier, politician, peer of the realm, and even as a septuagenarian dancer in cult rituals. His career is the one that retrospection--the great pleasure of finishing the novel--allows us to see as choreographed by the author in time, and that provokes a desire to reread the whole again, to put into place how the fatal events unfolded.

It just won't do to lose touch with these remarkable people.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.