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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
86 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Elizabeth Bowen,
By
This review is from: The Last September (Paperback)
"The Last September" is set on the plantation of Anglo-Irish gentry against the background of the "The Troubles" in Ireland in 1929. In the midst of the hostilities of war, Lois Farquar, an 18-year-old orphan, and her family and friends go about their leisured lives. The real world around them enters their lives in the form of British troops they befriend, and the Irish people who live on their lands. They fill their leisure time with tennis, parties, and falling in love. Love is not a simple, sentimental affair for a Bowen character. Bowen knows that love is as complex as nature and human motives. The story traces Lois's growing awareness of herself as an adult, and her efforts to find out what she wants to do with her life. As is almost always the case in an Elizabeth Bowen novel, what happens is not as important as what the author observes about what happens and who it's happening to. Bowen is a master of language and of characterization. In this beautifully written novel she creates a gallery of finely articulated, minutely observed and exquisitely individual characters, who seem as real as the people you know in your own life. "The Last September" is one of Bowen's most cohesive novels. The reality of the Troubles provides the solid ground that supports the very personal events in the lives of the characters. I strongly recommend this book, which is best read after "The Heat of the Day" and "The Death of the Heart", at the very least. It is one of Elizabeth's Bowen's finest works.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Aching Self,
By
This review is from: The Last September (Paperback)
Elizabeth Bowen's _The Last September_ is really a novel about internal self-talk and how that internal dialogue with the self is full of unarticulated desires, willful self-deceptions, and social anxieties of all sorts. Bowen has an incredibly penetrating knowledge of how people try to flatter themselves, read the world as revolving around themselves, and focus intently on an inner life that is completely wrong in many of its assumptions about what others think and feel. The way that ideology blinds people to reality of life and other's feelings is a continual subtle conflict running throughout the novel: two main ideological struggles occur. First, there is a constant tension between what "society" wants women to be and the reality of being a woman. There is a strong lesbian subtext in the novel although it is seems that the heroine has no conception of lesbianism or that frustrated lesbianism could be a reason for her problems in life. Yet at times the heroine makes such grossly inappropriate--yet spontaneous or seemingly irrelevant--remarks for a heterosexual woman that it is debatable if we are to see her as truly unaware of the potential for lesbian love. At any rate, the novel is so full of obsessive concern with gossip and what will people think of this or that to be blind to such desire seems absolutely mandatory. Blindness is a major metaphor in the novel, one that Bowen specifically relates to the political situation in Ireland in 1918. The second major conflict in the novel is that between the Anglo-Irish and the English--despite the conflict between the pro-republic Irish and the English that is part of the plot. The real focus of the book is on the plight of these Anglo-Irish who feel such a huge gap between their worldview and that of the English. The English people's absolute failure to see this gap and assumption that of course these Anglo-Irish value all that is English and desire that is a major theme. This book is achingly realistic in its depiction of the self-doubts that erode the joy of life with anxieties and confusion and its clear depiction of how the really important "rules of society" are the unwritten ones that determine who is able to communicate and share feelings and who is left feeling "unreal" and lonely. Ultimately the book is about the difficulty of finding happiness when people cannot understand themselves, their mental needs or desires, or the very different needs and desires of others. Bowen's best passages (to some they will be funny, to others heartbreaking) are the conversations between characters that are complete failures of communication. Bowen gives us glimpses of the self-talk of the characters and reveals their complete misunderstandings as well as their few powerful insights into each other's natures. The fate of the Anglo-Irish living in 1819 in today's Irish Republic is the most direct illustration of the theme of how difficult it is to communicate and find happiness, but I would argue it is meant to be symbolic of larger social problems that do not get enacted in violence.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The pangs of independence,
By
This review is from: The Last September (Paperback)
One of Elizabeth Bowen's finest novels, THE LAST SEPTEMBER has grown in popularity in recent years thanks to the overtly political nature of its topic (the demise of the Anglo-Irish "county" life by means of the Irish War of Independence) and the recent 1999 film adaptation with Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw. Most of the novel's action takes place in Danielstown, the Leinster country manor of Sir Richard and Myra Naylor and their wards Lois and Laurence. At the summer season, the estate plays host to all manner of guests, including the ill-matched and unhappy Montmorencys, the highly independent Marda Nolan, and some of the local garrisoned British officers and their wives whom Lois has befriended. As they play tennis and devour raspberries, their discussion is turned primarily towards gossip and flirtation--not to the escalating violence that surrounds and dooms their isled privilege.Like most of Bowen's earlier fiction, THE LAST SEPTEMBER is difficult reading and demands close attention: the Naylors and their set rarely say either to themselves or to one another clearly what they mean, and express themselves via euphemism, overexaggeration, understatement, and/or indirection. Only when the change of independence, either sexual or political, threatens does language become more direct and urgent: this is one of the great themes of this important modern novel. Although its outcome is tragic, the book is ultimately quite funny (as are all of Bowen's novels), and its peculiar tension between these two modes captures well the odd tensions of the cloistered and privileged world of the Anglo-Irish.
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