The Heat of the Day

This may be one of the best books, I've ever read, or at least one of the least expected. And there's no way I can do it justice, because so much of the pleasure was in the writing which was funny, incisive, and lyrical -- not to mention syntactically challenging -- sometimes all at once. Stella is a woman in her 40s in London in 1943, where the Germans are bombing. At the outset, the somewhat mysterious and unattractive Harrison tells her that her former lover, Robert Kelway, is selling out his country. Naturally, she doesn't believe him -- but she doesn't disbelieve him enough to go to Robert, at least not right away. Meanwhile, an Irish cousin of her dead ex-husband's dies and leaves his family manor to her son, Roderick. At the same time, a floozy whose husband is fighting in India spends the war sleeping around and gets pregnant -- but fortuitously the husband is killed without even finding out. And Robert's family tries to decide whether to sell their *own* manor. This book demanded and deserved to read in a few days by anyone hoping to understand it beyond the superficial. I began it in April and only just finished, having interspersed other books on the way. As a result, I mostly appreciated it in episodes -- Stella's son's meeting with the institutionalized (but by no means crazy) widow of the cousin who left him the estate; Robert's family's haggling over the decision to sell or not to sell (his sister calls their mother Muttikins); the final meeting between Robert and Stella; a late night conversation between the floozy and her best friend about the universe; a description of a dismal small English town in the late afternoon during wartime.

Elizabeth Bowen was new to me, but as she appears in "1001 Books To Read Before You Die" several times, I gave it a try. "Heat of the Day" is far from a conventional novel; it is circumspect, indirect and suggestive rather than bold. The story takes place in war time London, where the usual constraints of propriety have loosened. Stella and her lover Robert exist in a vacuum; important wartime jobs are hinted at but never revealed. Stella is approached by the mysterious Harrison, who tells her Robert is a spy. If she tells this to Robert, Harrison warns, his behavior will change, which will immediately confirm the truth of what Harrison is saying. The price for Robert's safety is Stella herself, but we don't really know how Harrison knows her or why he has fallen in love with her. It's a trap, and secretely Stella must suspect there's something to what Harrison says, because she doesn't reveal the secret to Robert, but tries to hold off Harrison for several months. Faced with the truth, however, Stella gives in, only for Harrison to discover that he hasn't gotten what he wants anyway. Wartime London is portrayed in a dreamy surreal way, most notably through Louie, the not-too-bright wife of a soldier. Adrift in a transitory world, where men come and go on their way to war, she accidently intrudes on Stella and Harrison in their ultimate confrontation, and her inability to understand what is happening almost mirrors the reader's own puzzlement. It's really through Louie that we get the greatest sense of how very unreal life was in London in those dark days. Bowen's style is difficult, and if you're looking for plot, look elsewhere. Bowen's genteel upper classes, the Stellas, the Roberts and his family, are under siege, from the Harrisons and Louies of the world as much as from the war. Ironically, Louie is the real survivor. This isn't an easy read, but Bowen is a master at suggesting atmosphere, mystery, and even menace in a very subtle way.

"Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf." The ATLANTIC MONTHLY comment printed on the cover sums the novel up perfectly. The Woolf element is the sensitive study of personality, especially that of Stella Rodney, a fortyish divorcée living in London at the time of the Blitz. Greene could well have provided the character of the sinister Harrison, who intrudes into Stella's life with the suggestion that her lover, Robert Kelway, might be a spy. But the two elements do not easily coexist. The psychological concerns hold up the story, which proceeds in episodes rather than linearly; its beginning is implausible in terms of narrative, and its ending in terms of character. But Bowen does look quite deeply into the bonds between friends, families, and lovers, and the many secrets we keep from one another and even from ourselves. Let me amplify this with a few specifics. If rating my immediate enjoyment of this particular book, I would have given it three stars rather than four, but I find it growing on me as I write. I have certainly admired the other three Bowens that I have read (THE LAST SEPTEMBER, THE HOUSE IN PARIS, and THE DEATH OF THE HEART), all of which feature much younger protagonists. She is a polished stylist, and her powers of description are extraordinary, as for instance in setting the stage for the late-summer open-air concert which opens this novel. She can also come up with striking stage-directions such as: "Tearless, she made a wailing movement of the arms above her head." In terms of the emotional content of the larger scene, this is unexpected but perfect. Or take the sentence with which the chapter [15] virtually opens: "Not a sign, not a sound, not a movement from where she at a distance from him lay, exhausted by having given birth to the question." Reread, pondered, and read again, this too is perfect; the narrative indirection and the combination of distance with closeness are the entire point of the episode -- but it is annoying that you have first to get through the artifice of the inversion of "at a distance from him lay" and to figure out what the question must have been that she asked. I suspect that this novel would continue to reveal riches on rereading, and so am glad to give Bowen the benefit of the doubt. But I fear that the ATLANTIC review may ultimately do her a disservice, and her choice of the Greene-like theme encourages a kind of first reading very different from what the author does best.

One sign of a good book is that it continues to pursue you after you have read the last page and put it down. First of all, I liked the switches of scene from war-torn London to the tranquil but disheartened countryside. We are reminded of the constraints of the blackout, ridiculous absence of identifying place-names on train journeys, confusing to friend and foe alike, and the changing progress and evolution of the war as the years go by. There is a difference between country life in England (Robert's family rattling around in a Victorian hulk they cannot decide what they want to do with), and in neutral Ireland (Roderick's inheritance, Mount Morris, where basic items are in short supply but there will be a sound future for it after the war). It is the story of a woman's gradual acceptance and understanding of an intolerable, heart-breaking situation, and there are some extraordinary vivid scenes that stay with you. The first chapter introduces us to the villain, Harrison, lost in thought while listening to the band in the park; it is not clear why he is so self-absorbed, or why is he so rude to the young woman in the next seat who is only striking up a casual conversation. The second chapter introduces the heroine and sets out the complexities of her ensuing dilemma and Harrison's place in it.This Harrison is a bit of a riddle and it's hard to be convinced by his sudden obsession with Stella without finding him somewhat abnormal. His scenes with Stella are understated and only when you mull them over do you realize how terrible they are, how shocking are the points he is making, the game he is playing. Before we have met Robert we have no way to assess Stella's reaction; is she going to be persuaded to casually drop him and take up with Harrison? How deep does their relationship go?Soon we find out that their relationship is central, that they are everything to each other, so profoundly attuned that they share each other's thoughts. Stella's relationship with her son Roderick is also superbly drawn; his masterful taking over of his Irish inheritance makes his army life seem juvenile and irrelevant; Mount Morris gives his life meaning. In contrast to these three central figures we have the complex orneriness of Harrison, turning up again and again and always introducing some unbearable tension, and Robert's powerful mother and sister, full of incoherent fuss, on whom Stella will "make no impression whatsoever," as Robert predicts. The characters are wonderfully interesting and individual. There is another important scene at the funeral of Cousin Francis where Stella meets Harrison for the first time and learns to everyone's surprise that Roderick is Francis' heir. Her late husband's family keep her at an icy distance.Two women living in the same apartment building make friends, share each other's woes and their lives lightly brush Stella's. They introduce a lighter note, or at least diffuse tension from the main protagonists, comi

This book was my introduction to the writing of Elizabeth Bowen. Her work has been described as a combination of Jane Austen and Henry James, and I think that sums her writing up pretty accurately. The Heat of the Day tells the story of Stella Rodney and the people she is connected with, by blood, by love, by fate, or all three. The story is set in London during World War II, with a friend telling her that Robert, her lover, is giving information to the Germans. The novel describes Stella's experiences in the succeeding months as she visits with her son, home on leave from the war; goes with Robert to his family home in the South of England; and travels to the home in Ireland which her son has inherited from an uncle. Throughout all this Stella is processing the information she received, and eventually acts on it. The outcome is not so much the point of the story as is the description of what Stella feels and remembers about her experiences, in the present and in the past.Bowen's language is elegant and poetic. Her descriptions of physical events, in nature or in the world of man-made objects, endow these events and objects with a life we know is there yet never notice. Her penetrating observation of the effect of physical objects and events manifests itself in another way as her awareness of the motives and causes of human behavior, the subatomic flickers that speak volumes in human interactions. Each of the characters the reader encounters is developed with astonishing subtlety, complexity and depth. The women and the men alike emerge as full human beings.In The Heat of the Day, as in many of her other novels, the reader becomes aware of the subtle forces in operation in the most commonplace of human experiences.I recommend this book highly; it truly combines the depth and elegance of James's prose with the wit and penetrating observation of Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bowen is a writer worth learning about.