Well, firstly huge apologies for my lack of posting: down to indolence rather than anything else I'm afraid.

As for The Acceptance World I enjoyed it much more than book two and less so than book one. It's a relief that Things Seem To Be Happening now. A bit of plot never did anyone any harm after al. But I'm consistently dismayed as to how much of it all seems driven by conincidence and bumping into people rather than any sort of agency from any of the characters. That statue at the Albert memorial must have been a rather busier pedestrian interchange than it is nowadays.

I'd agree with Will that Widmerpool is turning out to be the most interesting character, though on reflection I think there's not much ambiguity in how Powell feels about him. He's a grasping, slightly stupid, thick-voiced man who still lives with his mother and has no understanding of social context whilst imagining himself to be the most socially adept person in any given circumstance. I think it's interesting that I only half want him to come a cropper, perhaps it's a side effect of the narrator's own inability to condemn Widmerpool.

I'm also waiting for a solidly believable female character to appear rather than the current roster of volatile femmes fatale/whores (Yes, there's an obvious joke to be made here but I'm not going to).

Perhaps it's a limitation of the narrator's world view, though I'm thinking it's more likely to be a deficiency in Powell's writing. Proust managed to create believable women who had a vividly depicted internal life, even if the narrator's frequently bizarre interpretation of that life was often foisted on the reader. At least they stuck in the mind, which is not something I could say about any of Powell's women.

Overall I have to say I'm finding this to be something of a Peter F Hamilton of novel sequences: lots of words but light on characters. And actually it's doing PFH a bit of a disservice, at least his plots are driven on by more than random chance.

Hmm. Time to order Summer from Amazon I think.