This has just started (2nd June) so it would be easy to catch up if you want to join in. It is my favourite novel series and I am re-reading it with the club.
As you turn a jaded eye towards those piled volumes still waiting to be examined, this is probably the last thing you want to hear. But it’s absolutely true: once you've reached the end of the Dance you should turn straight back to the first book, just to marvel at how subtly it casts its shadows across the decades. I promise you, that extra push is entirely worth the effort.
For one thing, A Question of Upbringing doesn't strike the reader as an ominous book the first time around. I certainly never got the sense that I was watching narrative ground-work being done - I was too taken in by the narrator's tone of unhurried reminiscence, his flair for what might be called novelistic portraiture. Powell has the ability to capture his sitters unawares even as they pose for him; subjecting them to merciless scrutiny and at the same time preserving a core of mystery. This still seems to me to be the greatest attraction in his writing, and it is displayed here at full strength.
We meet Stringham and Templer, sharing rooms with our narrator Nicholas Jenkins at an unnamed boarding school in the early '20s, where they are readying themselves for entry into the wider world. At once we recognise their pretensions: Stringham's languid, aphoristic style; Templer's affected worldliness. They look as if they are trying out roles - and yet by some double-bluff this very air of artifice brings them unexpectedly to life.
It helps that they are both funny. Indeed their witticisms often take on a sort of independent existence, working their way into the texture of Nick's narrative with only a passing hat-tip to acknowledge the source. Take the first, mocking exclamation at "Widmerpool's good sensible shoes" (squeaking, Nick adds, "like the notes of a barbaric orchestra"). The line is Stringham's and this is the first we learn of him: hearing him before we see him, that arch, fluting voice of his carrying to us as if across the wastes of memory, a characteristic mode of introduction in the Dance.
Stringham is a dandy, but his dandyism is distinguished from utter, Saki-like facetiousness by the signs of strain and revolt that we glimpse in him: that startling prank at his housemaster's expense, or the brittle coolness of his family relationships. We grow concerned that he might really be as tired of life as he makes out.
...
Without giving too much away, we follow a group of people most of whom dip in and out of the narrator's life and see their lives unfold and connections made, re-made and broken over time.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/arts/papertiger/jun06/questionofupbringing.htm?cmd=thanks#comments
