Entirely Acceptable

I've a sneaking suspicion that I may just have crept ahead of Will, which will hopefully annoy him a little.

Knocked off The Acceptance World in a few days, mostly over the weekend. It's pretty easy going stuff - not as fluffy as Volume 1, but with more momentum than Volume 2. Pleasingly, the character of Jenkins (Powell) is developed a lot more in this book. We also get our first hints of the decline of some characters - the artists Isbistor and St John Clarke, Le Bas, Stringham and even Peter Templer's powers begin to fail him. This is all accompanied by the inexorable rise of Widmerpool, and to a lesser extent Quiggin too.

I think I enjoyed this volume especially, because we are all, quite obviously, in the Acceptance World (not italicised) ourselves to a greater or lesser extent. At what point in our lives do we accept that the futures we have invested in may or may not give us the returns we'd expected. I certainly don't feel I've settled with my lot, but I've got younger friends who have and much older friends who haven't. Of course, the depressing thing, and I've spoken with Will about this, is that I am probably the equivalent of Quiggin - the overtly ambitious state school/Oxbridge alumnus who tries just a little too hard (thankfully not a Marxist though) - and it seems that whilst even Widmerpool is redeemable, nobody, it seems, loves a Quiggin.