The city in wartime

• Book: The Heat of the Day
• Location: Ireland, London
• Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Review Author: Vasha

In “The Heat of the Day”, Elizabeth Bowen is working with the idea that in wartime, normal society is suspended and its ties broken, leaving people’s relationships and behavior uncertain and free to go in unexpected directions. This is a state of both promise and peril. The main character, Stella Rodney, thrives on this betweenness, and won’t do so well after the war is over.

Robert Kelway, the only character not to survive to the end of the novel, is also the one dealing least successfully with the social changes that brewed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. As part of a mobile middle class, he’d felt rootless all his life, but more importantly something about society had made him feel emasculated. He committed treason because he wanted British society to be destroyed and replaced with something (he’s quite vague about what exactly) that would allow him to be a man. He blamed his discontent on his mother and other women. He even blamed Stella (no matter how much he loved her) for not somehow being able to save him by her love.

Stella, for whose great love the author has a lot of sympathy, indeed plays the role of universal scapegoat, and has done so all her life. No matter what the circumstances, other people always seem to think she’s in the wrong or responsible for it, and she accepts that, not always out of generosity but more out of self-possession and courage. Luckily for her, she has a son who understands her. Their relationship is one of the most optimistic things in the novel. And the book ends with an optimistic view of a minor character and her son also: Louie Lewis, who’s mostly until then played the role of a ridiculous foil to the tragic gravity of Stella’s story, will be contented and at home in the new England. The author may consider this new society a bit ignoble and inelegant, but neither is it as bad as Robert thinks.

Stella is a compelling character, but I can’t rate this book a wholehearted four stars because of its clotted style. Sometimes, the phrases provide illumination, but more often they seem like circumlocutions.

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