THE HEAT OF THE DAY (372 pp.]—Elizabeth Bowen—Knopf ($3).
For 20 years the literary reputation of 49-year-old Irish-born Novelist Elizabeth Bowen has been based on a polished prose style and a special ability to write about sensitive children and young people in their first discovery of the compromises and dishonesties in the grown-up world. Her best-known novels (To the North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart) were so skillfully wrought that literary critics ranked them with the work of the late Virginia Woolf.
The latest news about Elizabeth Bowen is that, in her new novel (her first in ten years), she has taken in hand a whole new range of novelist's material; that this material includes the war and many of the unprecedented goods & evils, loyalties and disloyalties that emerged into mid-century consciousness in the course of it. It is by all odds her finest book.
The Corroding Drop. When war came, Elizabeth Bowen was 40, a homely-handsome woman with a slight stutter and great charm, married to an executive of the BBC. She and her husband, Alan Cameron, had a tall house facing London's Regent's Park. There, Novelist Bowen sat down deliberately to restudy her Irish background, her English foreground and the lives she knew as they settled into war. The first result was a long book, Bowen's Court, on the history of her family and the estate in Cork that they had owned since Cromwell's day. The second was a book of short stories. The third is The Heat of the Day.
The typical scene of the novel is London in the blackout of 1942; the relations of human beings to each other have become fragmentary, indefinable and constantly subject to shock. To the apartment of attractive Stella Rodney comes a visitor known to her only as Harrison. He tries to argue her into being seduced and fails. He makes fantastic charges about Stella's friend and faithful lover, Captain Robert Kelway, and, for a time, fails to make the fantastic believable.
What Harrison claims to know is that the admirable Captain Kelway is dealing with the enemy. This is incredible in a man like Kelway, who was wounded at Dunkirk and has responsible duties at the War Office. But Harrison is clever; the drop of suspicion that he injects remains to corrode a happy love affair.
The Man of No Class. The terrible human lesson that all three—Harrison, Kelway and Stella Rodney—have to learn is in the peculiar contemporary meanings of treason. Who is to be trusted, and why, and how far? It is appropriate that each of Miss Bowen's characters is engaged in secret work, for each is mysterious to the other. But before the end it is clear that each represents an important type of modern personality.