Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
St Paul’s rises above the smoke and flames on 29 December 1940.
St Paul’s rises above the smoke and flames on 29 December 1940. Photograph: Maso/Daily Mail/Rex/Shutterstock
St Paul’s rises above the smoke and flames on 29 December 1940. Photograph: Maso/Daily Mail/Rex/Shutterstock

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen – archive, 20 February 1949

This article is more than 5 years old

In our latest classic review from the Observer archive, John Hayward revels in Bowen’s observations of love during the blitz

The Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen was an air-raid warden during the second world war, and her house near Regent’s Park was bombed in 1944. This novel draws upon her experience of London in the blitz.

Miss Elizabeth Bowens’s new novel – her first since 1938 and therefore especially welcome – reveals clearly and significantly how her thought and sensibility have matured. The intervening years have meant the passing of youth and the onset of middle age, the implications of this process are very skilfully correlated in the distracted love-affair which is the principle theme of her novel.

The late flowering of love in wartime has rarely been more poignantly described or more effectively presented as an integral experience, shared equally by a man and a woman – in love, and under fire together, in the beleaguered London of the blitz. The emotional tension, which has always strained the relations of Miss Bowen’s lovers, is heightened for this couple by forces of vague apprehension and unrest outside and entirely beyond their control. The sense of impending danger and, at times, of imminent death sustains throughout their story an undertone of extraordinary excitement.

This external strain is most vividly and movingly realised in Miss Bowen’s account of the mental, moral and emotional climate of London from the autumn of 1940 onwards: and especially in her evocation of “the tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day” of its civilian garrison – a way of life “so ideal for romantic love, made easy by the indifference of the embattled city to private lives; the exiguousness and vagueness of everybody’s existence among the ruins”.

Above this thrilling undertone, however, there sounds an ominous note of particular excitement – the “all amort” of the counter-espionage agent in pursuit of his victim. It is the gradual yet inexorable closing in of hunter and hunted that gives to the somewhat overintellectualised relationship of the two lovers an emotional urgency and intensity it would otherwise lack.

Stella Rodney is a beautiful and subtle characterisation. This portrait of a mature woman “on happy, sensuous terms with life” seems to glow with a vital warmth and colour almost wholly lacking in the flat, under-developed prints of her lover – the disaffected and ambiguous Robert Kelway – her son, Roderick, and the tortuous Harrison, who attempts to bargain for Stella’s favours with her lover’s life.

The failure to give imaginative reality to these shadows is redeemed by her perfectly finished studies of women. Robert’s petulant mother, his sister, a self-inserted linchpin in the home counties WVS, the servant-girl at Mount Morris – Roderick’s Irish inheritance, and for a bewitching moment a release from the inner and outer tension, and, above all, the cockney sparrows, Louie and Connie – are each fully and distinctly individualised andat the same time representative of a class, acting and reacting according to type under the stress of war. Their unity in diversity sets off most impressively the sombre drama of division and death in which the chief actors in this outstanding work of imagination are involved.

Most viewed

Most viewed