Word: widmerpool
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...lugubrious about all this. As in his earlier volumes he maintains, through Jenkins, the tolerantly amused air of a man who can come to terms with almost anything, preferably over drinks and with some gossip and a laugh or two thrown in. He can even endure Kenneth Widmerpool, that bumptious, obtuse careerist who has moved like an inexorable force through the entire series. Widmerpool, it now appears, is never going to get the comeuppance he deserves. In Temporary Kings he has a close scrape over a bit of cold-war espionage, but extricates his questionable honor and career, typically...
...Widmerpool's wife Pamela, an elegant harpie who was visited upon him like a judgment in Powell's previous volume, Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), who now moves to center stage. As promiscuous and frigid as ever, she lends a macabre sexual touch to dreadful Widmerpool's international intriguing. She also ensnares Powell's two important new characters-Louis Glober and Russel Gwinnett...
...major parts are played by familiar figures from previous volumes. Kenneth Widmerpool, who epitomizes all that is obnoxious and pathetic in people who get ahead in the world, is now M.P. His newly acquired wife is the fabled Pamela Flitton, as bitchy and beautiful as she is promiscuous. Widmerpool is backing Nick's magazine and its editor, a furtive, bibulous literary hack known in the trade as Books-Do-Furnish-a-Room Bagshaw. Pamela is backing a gifted, eccentric writer in the magazine's stable, X. Trapnel, to the extent that she leaves Widmerpool and moves in with...
...flesh-and-blood originals of Powell's fictional characters is necessary to savor his prose. But would it really help to know that Moreland, the intelligent musician who provides such a sparkling commentary on this world, was perhaps drawn from Composer Constant Lambert, or that the vastly comic Widmerpool was lovingly conjured from the fatuous figure of a minor Tory Cabinet Minister? It seems most unlikely...
...novel No. 1, A Question of Upbringing), who fought with the wrong partisans. The Malayan debacle takes another of Powell's veteran characters, Charles Stringham, P.O.W. and presumed dead. The officer indirectly responsible for the orders that killed both men turns out to be the egregious Kenneth Widmerpool, whose fatuous careerism and brassbound egotism have provided veins of comedy running through all nine books. Widmerpool, an ambition addict who flourishes amidst the adversities of the rest of the world, turns up as a colonel, squeezing the epaulettes of power until the pips squeak. These exits and re-entrances emphasize...