Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant was published by Heinemann in 1960. The title refers to an actual London restaurant (now demolished) that combined Chinese food with an improbable décor suggesting an eighteenth-century Venetian gambling house — a conjunction that perfectly embodies Powell’s sense of life’s incongruities.
The novel moves into the musical world through the character of Hugh Moreland, a composer who becomes one of Jenkins’s closest friends. Moreland’s marriage to the actress Matilda Wilson provides one of the volume’s two marital narratives; the other is the disintegrating marriage of Charles Stringham’s sister Flavia to an older musician. Both marriages fail, but Powell’s treatment is characteristically oblique — the failures are conveyed through accumulations of small incidents, overheard remarks, and shifts in atmosphere rather than through dramatic confrontations.
The Spanish Civil War enters the Dance through Erridge Tolland, who goes to Spain as a volunteer, and through the increasingly heated political arguments that divide the social circle. Powell handles the politics with the same detachment he brings to everything else: he is interested not in the rights and wrongs of Spain but in the way political commitment distorts personal relationships, turns friends into enemies, and provides camouflage for personal motivations that have nothing to do with politics.
Collecting Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1960): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100