The 100 best novels: No 69 – The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 novel perfectly captures the atmosphere of London during the blitz while providing brilliant insights into the human heart
Robert McCrum
Sunday 12 January 2015
London in the blitz influenced the creative lives of many important English writers, from Graham Greene to Rose Macaulay. But none captured wartime London as memorably as Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), an Anglo-Irish writer who first attracted critical attention with a collection of short-stories in 1923.
Like The Death of the Heart, her prewar masterpiece, The Heat of the Day opens in Regent’s Park, on “the first Sunday of September 1942”, with the sinister figure of Harrison, a counterespionage agent posing as an airman, chatting up a woman at an open-air concert. He’s killing time till his evening “date” with Stella Rodney, the novel’s protagonist, an attractive, independent woman “on happy sensuous terms with life” who works for a government agency called XYD and is described as a “camper in rooms of draughty dismantled houses”.
Stella is dispossessed, but she has in her lover Robert, a Dunkirk survivor, someone with whom she can share mutual passion and “the continuous narrative of love”. But even this is in jeopardy. Harrison, who has been watching Robert, advises Stella that her lover is suspected of passing information to the enemy. He offers Stella a bargain: his silence about Robert’s treachery for an impossible price – herself. Once Robert confesses, his love will be doomed.
Elizabeth Bowen |
Trapped between spy and spycatcher, Stella struggles to keep her life in balance while recognising she’s adrift in dark times. Occasional passages of great beauty capture the atmosphere of the nightly bombing of London: “Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine.”
Like many writers who come to the novel through the short story, Bowen’s fiction is highly symbolic and tightly wound with acres of meaning crowded into the disjunctions and silences of everyday conversation. Harold Pinter was a natural for the screenplay of the 1989 TV version of the novel. The Heat of the Day is both of its time and timeless. A spy story and a haunting love story. Bowen catches the provisional, precarious atmosphere of a society facing the threat of imminent destruction. More than just a great writer of the blitz, she is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis.
The best account of this subject, in addition to Victoria Glendinning’s important biography of Bowen, is Lara Feigel’s The Love Charm of Bombs, an exploration of the blitz as a metropolitan trauma. Feigel’s absorbing and well-researched group portrait of five prominent writers caught up in the nightly routine of sirens and barrage includes Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel (an Austrian writer trapped in wartime Wimbledon) and Henry Yorke (better known as the novelist Henry Green). Nevertheless, the blitz remains a comparatively under-explored literary terrain. Sarah Waters’s 2006 novel The Night Watch is a rare example of a serious attempt to make popular literature out of this crucial episode from the second world war.
A note on the text
The Heat of the Day was favourably compared, on publication, to the work of EM Forster, Virginia Woolf and Henry Green, (Nos 48, 50, and 63 in this series). It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1948 in the United Kingdom, and in 1949 in the United States of America by Alfred A Knopf.
Some critics place it beneath The Death of the Heart (1938) in importance. I’ve chosen it both because it has always been a favourite of mine and also because it helps to make a bridge in this list between the fiction of the 1930s and the transformed literary landscape of the postwar world.
Not everyone was enthralled by The Heat of the Day. Raymond Chandler, unfairly, described it as “a screaming parody of Henry James”. The New Statesman’s critic, more judicious, wrote: “Unerringly, exquisitely, Miss Bowen has caught the very feel of her period… The novel is the most completely detailed and most beautiful evocation of it that we have yet had.” Anthony Burgess, writing later, concurred. “No novel has better caught the atmosphere of London during the second world war.”
Three more from Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September (1929); The House in Paris (1935); The Death of the Heart (1938).
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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