Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

First edition cover
Author	Anthony Powell
Cover artist	James Broom-Lynne
Language	English
Series	A Dance to the Music of Time
Publisher	Heinemann
Publication date	1960
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	229 pp
Preceded by	At Lady Molly's
Followed by	The Kindly Ones (novel)

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is a novel by Anthony Powell (ISBN 0-09-947244-9). It forms the fifth volume of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, and was originally published in 1960. Many of the events of the novel were included in the television adaptation broadcast on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 in 1997, comprising part of the second of four episodes. There was also an earlier, more comprehensive, BBC Radio adaptation.

As with several of the earlier volumes, there is a substantial time-overlap with previous books, the first part returning to the period before the death of Mr. Deacon. However, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant concentrates on a new set of characters, principally the composer Hugh Moreland, (based on Powell's close friend Constant Lambert), his fiancée Matilda, and the critic Maclintick and his wife, Audrey, whose unhappy marriage forms a key part of the narrative.

The interweaving of historical with fictional events is more notable here, and is deployed to illuminate the characters, as for example in Erridge's ill-considered departure for the Spanish Civil War. .

Reception

Much of the book's reception, like that of its franchise, has been positive, with one reviewer calling the novel 'by far the funniest in Powell's saga ... much of the story surpasses even Evelyn Waugh at his most scathingly satirical, and P. G. Wodehouse at his most daftly farcical' and with another saying that the story was 'simply brilliant.' However, Evelyn Waugh himself, who reviewed all of the early installments of the series, complained of 'a sad disappointment ... only three pages of [Kenneth] Widmerpool.