The concluding sections of the previous novel, The Kindly Ones, show series protagonist Nick Jenkins trying to join the army.

Series protagonist Nick Jenkins, in every volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, is found very closely observing the people he encounters.

In The Valley of Bones, Nick trains his eye on those serving with him, finding himself "in the midst of a group of middle-class South Welsh bank officers, clerks, and miners few if any of whom have attended university or had any exposure to metropolitan life.

"[5] His observations lead him to claim to David Pennistone, an officer, that "it is a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities".

Poems, paintings, painters, games, bar songs, marching songs, parts of the Bible, hymns, crafts, Greek myths, novels, Shakespeare's plays and cultural touchpoints for the British military in the early years of World War II are woven throughout each chapter of The Valley of Bones.

[6] And yet, according to the magisterial "Pictures in Powell", "perhaps as a result of the grimness of the early years of the War, it has the fewest references to visual art of all the volumes.

Leaving, he says, "Now at last I was geared to the machine of war, no longer an extraneous organism existing separately in increasingly alien conditions."

"[9] Bernard Bergonzi, in The New York Review of Books in 1964, wrote, "...The Valley of Bones is one of the solidest and most entertaining volumes in the sequence, enabling its author to cast a cool and penetrating eye on the complex follies inherent in military life.

"[10] James Tucker, in his 1976 book on the novels of Anthony Powell, says of The Valley of Bones, "Beautifully low-profile comedy, it attempts nothing beyond the wholly credible.

"[11] Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a critical review of The Valley of Bones in the Evening Standard in 1964 in which he took the occasion to write that the entire series was a failure.