The Kindly Ones was published by Heinemann in 1962, closing the second movement of the Dance. The title refers to the Eumenides — the Furies of Greek mythology who were euphemistically called “the kindly ones” to avoid provoking them — and the novel is haunted by premonitions of the catastrophe to come. The volume is structurally unusual: it opens with a long section set in 1914, when the young Jenkins is a child at his family’s rented house near Stonehurst, and the servants’ affairs, the mysterious comings and goings of the adults, and the distant rumble of the approaching First World War are seen through a child’s uncomprehending eyes.
The second section jumps to 1938–39. Jenkins is now in his mid-thirties, the Munich crisis has revealed the inevitability of war, and the social world of the Dance is rearranging itself in preparation. Characters who have been peripheral become important; alliances shift; and the death of Uncle Giles — Jenkins’s disreputable uncle, a figure of perpetual minor scandal — provides the occasion for a scene at the Bellevue Hotel that is among Powell’s most darkly comic.
The volume’s power comes from its juxtaposition of 1914 and 1939 — the same patterns of folly, complacency, and approaching disaster, separated by twenty-five years. Powell suggests that history does not repeat but rhymes, and that the dance to the music of time is, fundamentally, a dance of destruction and renewal.
Collecting The Kindly Ones
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1962): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80