The Heat of the Day (Paperback)

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.

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.

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