Volume 12, Number 8 · April 24, 1969
Lieutenants and Luftmenschen
By John Gross
The Military Philosophers
by Anthony Powell
Little, Brown, 244 pp., $4.95
Mr. Bridge
by Evan S. Connell Jr.
Knopf, 369 pp., $5.95
Pictures of Fidelman
by Bernard Malamud
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pp., $5.95
The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl
by Sholom Aleichem, Translated from the Yiddish by Tamara Kahana
Putnam's, 222 pp., $5.95
With The Military Philosophers Anthony Powell reaches forward into the mid-Forties and completes the third, penultimate movement of 'The Music of Time.' The concluding installment of his wartime trilogy, it is also to my mind the most successful—partly, I think, because in spite of the title it is the one least saturated in military mystique. Unless one happens to share the author's predilection for regimental lore and red tabs and the nine-and-thirty ways of pulling rank, there are times when the atmosphere of the two preceding volumes, The Valley of Bones and The Soldier's Art, turns undeniably oppressive. The new book, by contrast, is more spacious. We have left behind, not the army itself, at any rate the parade ground and the officers' mess: the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, now has a desk job in Whitehall, acting as a liaison officer first with the Poles and later with the Belgians and Czechs. Displaced cavalry commanders and military attachés waltz around like characters in an operette; haut fonctionnaires intrigue; local bureaucrats abstruct. And a strong sub-plot is provided by the sexual depredations of Pamela Flitton, last glimpsed half a dozen volumes back as a five-year-old bridesmaid being sick in the font, now a full-grown and formidable vixen.
Review, 1733 words
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