Couldn't read more than about 10 pages of this. Some of the most atrocious writing I've ever read in my life. ( )

This is the third novel I've read by [[Elizabeth Bowen]], and she is a hit or miss author for me. It took me a while to get into [The Heat of the Day]. Bowen writes densely. It's easy to miss a big plot point in a long descriptive passage, so you have to read closely.

This book was published in 1948, but takes place in 1942 London. I wondered when she actually wrote the novel. It has an immediacy regarding WWII that is impactful. The main character is Stella, who is in a relationship with a man named Robert. In the opening scenes, a stranger named Harrison approaches her and tells her that Robert is a spy. As the book unfolds, Stella has to decide who to believe and whether or not she even wants to know. The parallel story involves her adult son, Roderick, who is in the Army. He inherits an Irish estate from his father's family, who Stella had divorced early in their marriage. This inheritance brings up the past and secrets are revealed. There are two other side plots - one involving Robert's family and one involving a young woman, Louie, who meets Harrison in the opening scene. I never did understand what Louie's story was meant to add to the book.

Once I got past the opening scenes and got my bearings, the plot carried the book along for me. The setting is also strong. However, sometimes I felt like Bowen was over-writing the material and putting the reader too far removed from the characters. The book is a bit meandering, but in the end I'm glad I read it. ( )

best novel to read

Upon closing this book, I had the strange sensation of not knowing exactly how I felt about it--and it occurred to me that that gave me much in common with the characters themselves, who were if nothing else confused about their world and themselves. In the end, the book was impressive enough to win a 3.5 rating, but I rounded down to a 3 because of some chapters in which my attention began to wonder.

This is a World War II story set primarily in London during the blitz and when the future outcome of the fighting was difficult to predict. The main character, Stella, is told, by a somewhat shady character who claims to be an intelligence operative, that her boyfriend of two years is a spy, betraying the English to the Germans. She struggles, as well one would, between what she believes she knows about this man and what she might possibly be missing. To ask is to accuse. Everything is on the line, and how much can one really know about anyone in such an unnatural and dangerous time?

Bowen is a good writer and anything but formulaic. She weaves a mystery that is not easily unraveled. But it is the psychological aspect of her writing that shines, her exploration of the inner man and woman. It is what Stella does with the information, how she navigates this thin line, that makes her and the story interesting.

”Oh, I should doubt,” she exclaimed, “whether there's any such thing as an innocent secret! Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts? Nothing keeps innocence innocent but daylight. A truth's just a truth, to start with, with no particular nature, good or bad--but how can any truth not go bad from being years underground? Dug up again after years and laid on the mat, it’s inconvenient, shocking--apart from anything else there’s no place left in life for it any more. To dig up someone else's truth for them would seem to me sheer malignancy; to dig up one's own, madness--I never would.”

If I had one complaint, it is that we are presented with several superfluous characters who do not add anything to the story, but who consume a great deal of paper and effort. I kept waiting for the tie-in, which never came, and which left me feeling a slight bit cheated. I also felt that the dialogue between the main characters was too often stilted and cold...I’m not sure even the WWII British would have spoken to one another in quite this way.


( )

I re-read this book because I’m doing a massive purge of my book collection in the coming months, and had absolutely no recollection of what this book was actually about, besides the fact that I know I read it for some course during my undergraduate degree. Upon finishing the re-read, I totally get why this book was wiped from my memory entirely - because it’s pretty unmemorable. The story starts out strong with interesting characters (a group of British spies in a love-triangle), a great setting (London during the Blitz), and a lot of potential tension (duh, spies), but about midway through the story the author seems to waver. The language becomes simplified and less descriptive, some of the characters develop weird quirks with no actual motivation, and then the whole thing winds up with a never-really explained suicide/murder and a passive aggressive anti-confrontation with no one actually moving forward. It’s really too bad that the author never managed to keep the story tightly knit, since there was a lot of potential for it to be a slightly more feminized take on the espionage genre and an interesting alternative to Le Carré’s high-tension paper-capers and Fleming’s overly-masculine 007. ( )