The Heat of the Day

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Writer With A Plot That Plods!
Review: "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

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Writer With A Plot That Plods!
Review: "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

Rating:
Summary: Lovely cover, dull story
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Private hazards of war
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Private hazards of war
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of Elizabeth Bowen's best novels.
Review: 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.