Customer Reviews

The Heat Of The Day.

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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, coming from another social stratum in the city in wartime.

What would lead a highly intelligent, educated, privileged man to become a traitor to his country? Climactic is the explanation Robert gives for his support of the other side, born of his disillusion with Dunkirk and need to envision a meaningful future at the end of the war. Does Stella accept it? The final chapter, like the first, shows us Louie, the aimless, artless girl at the band-stand, now at the end of the war having lost her husband but gained a child of her own, returning to live in the ravaged seaside town where she spent her childhood.

"Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolfe." When I read this Atlantic Monthly blurb on Elizabeth Bowen's "The Heat Of The Day," I thought, this is a book for me. It took me 200 pages before I became involved in the novel. I did not put it down earlier, because I must admit, objectively, that Elizabeth Bowen's writing style is elegant, and at times poetic. I was curious to learn what she wanted to say through the novel's characters and plot. However she does take forever to say something. Her dialogue is often inane, and her unnecessary descriptions slow the storyline unbearably. I am not a reader who requires a book to be plot driven, but Ms. Bowen's meanderings are excessive.

One of the book's reviewers, V.S. Pritchett, writes, "Out of the plainest things - the drawing of a curtain - she can make something electric and urgent." I beg to disagree with Mr. Pritchett, but there is absolutely nothing electric, in this case, about a full page description of a woman drawing the curtains and looking out the window. It is downright tedious. After a long, rather innocuous conversation with her son, our heroine Stella Rodney, puts her cigarette out in the ashtray. After a pause, her son says, "I suppose you'll need the wastebasket." That was the conversation's high point.

The story takes us to wartorn London, about midway through WWII. Stella Rodney, an attractive, intelligent woman in her 40s, is divorced with a son in the Army. Ms. Bowen portrays the tension and eeriness of a city, and its inhabitants, stressed by years of war and bombardment. Stella keeps running into a strange man, Harrison, who first introduces himself to her at her cousin's funeral. The meeting is not accidental. Apparently Harrison is working for one of England's secret services. He informs her that her lover, Robert, is an enemy spy. Harrison wants her to stop seeing Robert, and begin a relationship with him. He has fallen in love with her, somewhat quickly, and based on very little time together. I would call him obsessed, in a low-keyed manner. Stella's willingness to begin an affair with Harrison, is the price she will have to pay for protecting the man she loves from arrest. During the ensuing months, while she ponders and processes this information, she spends time with her son, goes with Robert to visit his family in their country estate, and makes a trip to Ireland to see about her son's inheritance. I suppose it is not the outcome of Stella's decision that is important, but her thoughts and feelings along the way.

Again, objectively, I would have to say that for some this may be a good novel. I do enjoy and appreciate subtlity, but Ms. Bowen's writing is too subtle for my taste.
JANA

I am rather torn by this novel. As a whole, I did not like it. I did not like it at all. I think a fair thing to say to the prospective reader is that if you fancy the work of Virginia Woolf (with whom Bowen was acquainted), then you shall fancy this novel. If not, not. I, as it chances, fall into the latter category. The prose is tedious, self-consciously soi-disant stylistic and ridiculously worded in parts. - Do you prefer "authenticativeness" to authenticity, reader, "alimentation" to nourishment? If so, this book is for you. - And yet, there are some fine sections that would make marvellous prose poems or vignettes here, unfortunately they are drowned out by Bowen's attempting to be...whatever it is that she is attempting to be, Virginia Woolf's literary scion? Also, for me, the book was full of nostalgia for the days when this sort of thing could find a publisher. Yes, the characters and plot (fully threshed out in the other reviews) are drainingly dull and arid. Yes, one feels like wringing Ms. Bowen's neck for describing disembarkation from a train thusly, comparing new arrivals to those already on the platform:

"Arrival of shades in Hades, the new dead scanned dubiously by the older, she thought that she could have thought;"

Ms Bowen thinks that she could have thought far too many things in this book, especially, here, ones already thought of by T.S. Eliot in his Wasteland. But, as I say, this muddiness is set off by gems like this, describing two lovers together:

"No, there is no such thing as being alone together. Daylight moves round the walls; night rings the changes of its intensity; everything is on its way to somewhere else - there is the presence of movement, however unheeding in their trance two might try to stay."

Lovely, perfect! - But such passages are seldom encountered amidst all the absurdly worded cerebration (a la Woolf) that makes this novel neither a love story nor a spy story, much less a brilliant combination of the two.

But one feels somehow that an A for effort is due here. The book is a failure that would simply not be allowed to fail in today's commercialised publishing world. So, three stars. For those not afraid of Virginia Woolf - She makes me shudder - you've found a kindred spirit!

"The Heat of the Day" is set in the autumn of 1942, and deals with the triangular relationship between its three main characters, Stella Rodney, Robert Kelway and Harrison. (For most of the book he is referred to only by his surname, although towards the end we learn that his Christian name is also Robert). Stella is a woman in her early forties, briefly married and then divorced about twenty years earlier. She is several years older than her soldier lover, Kelway. Kelway was wounded during the retreat to Dunkirk, and is now working for the army in a non-combatant role which involves access to classified information.

Harrison, an agent with the British secret services, is investigating Kelway, who is suspected of passing military secrets to the enemy. Harrison contacts Stella and informs her that Kelway is suspected of treachery. He, however, is prepared to bargain; he will allow Kelway to remain at liberty provided that Stella becomes his lover.

Of the three main characters, it is Kelway who is potentially the most interesting. He is a man who is prepared not only to betray his country but also to collaborate with a regime as vile as the Nazi one. He has neither been bribed or blackmailed, but has made the decision to assist the enemy out of ideological conviction. Unlike most Nazi sympathisers, however, he does not appear to be motivated by racism or anti-Semitism. He rather believes that the freedom promised by democratic systems of government is an illusion and that it is the unity and strength conferred by obedience to a powerful leader which hold out the greater hope for mankind.

Both the other main characters are also, in their own way, traitors; Harrison in that he puts his own sexual advantage before his duty to his country and Stella in that she is prepared to assist Kelway to escape even after he has confessed his treachery to her. As others have pointed out, this could have been the plot of a Graham Greene thriller, although Elizabeth Bowen's treatment of her subject matter is very different from the way Greene would have handled it. For a start, there is very little mention of religion, something which normally plays an important part in Greene's works. More importantly, although Bowen is interested in exploring the psychology of her characters on the surface level, she does not explore their deeper reasons for their behaviour, something which, I feel sure, would have interested Greene.

I felt that more time should have been spent in exploring the motivations of the main characters; the psychology of a man like Kelway, in particular, could have made for an interesting character study, but this opportunity was neglected. We never really see the process whereby he has come to the conclusion that it is totalitarianism, not democracy, that represents the wave of the future; we are simply presented with his opinions at the end of the book when he confesses his guilt to Stella and attempts to explain his treachery to her. (It is also never explained why he should have developed an admiration for Nazism rather than Communism, which had rather more support in Britain at this period).

On a more immediate level, however, Bowen is very sensitive to the nuances of social behaviour and conversation, which meant that her characters always seem vivid and real. Her prose style is elegant, and she is good at conjuring up a sense of time and place, taking her reader back to a damp, foggy autumn in London and the Home Counties, midway through the Second World War. (The "Heat" in the title is metaphorical- this is not a book about a hot summer). The book did not, however, seem well-structured- too much of the book was taken up with sub-plots with little connection with the main story. Bowen tells how Kelway's family debate whether or not to sell their family home and how Stella's son Roderick inherits a country house in Ireland from a cousin- Bowen was herself from an Irish landowning family- and wastes a good deal of time on Louie, a young woman with only a vague connection to Stella and Harrison, and her friend Connie. Although there were things to enjoy in "The Heat of the Day" it did not impress me as much as "The Death of the Heart", the only other one of Bowen's novels which I have read.

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.

Few books have taken me for such a wonderful ride as this one. You can get the plot from the publishers blurb. I found the story engaging, provocative, and rich. I thought the prose was elegant.

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.

I consider myself a reader of some discernment, but this book was among the most difficult to enjoy or to offer any reason to go beyond the 160 pages that I managed to muddle through.

First, it seemed very dated and the pages and pages of descriptions of minutiae broken up by dialogue every ten pages or so, it seemed, were real barriers to getting an understanding of the book. Also, the characters were so bloodless and chilly and the tone so remote that it was impossible to identify with or like these characters. When I arrived at page 160 and Louie was mentioned, a scramble ensued to figure out who the heck she was.

We read this for our book club. We have four English teachers in the group, several librarians and other educated people and to a person, we loathed this book. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone and can't see why it deserved renewed attention all these many years later.