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Harrison is the new man of no class at all: unromantic, infinitely disabused, superficially amoral, homeless but looking for a home, the unpleasant agent of the saving truth. Stella is the daughter of an older civilization, of the gentry, attached to the land; though long astray from it, she is still strong and still able to learn. Robert Kelway is the middle-class man of sophisticated ambition; he is split down the middle between the commercially created and shopworn forms of life that have weakened his patriotism, and a madly pure fantasy of future order to which, finding no alternative, he has committed himself. Kelway is a Nazi agent. He accepts his own destruction when he learns that Stella cannot understand him and his fantasy, and knows that he has lost.
Power & the Void. "Subjection to fantasy and infatuation with the idea of power" were elements that Elizabeth Bowen found in the history of her own Irish forebears, but with a difference. "One may say," she wrote in Bowen's Court, "that while property lasted, the dangerous power-idea stayed, like a sword in its scabbard, fairly safely at rest. I submit that the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We have everything to dread from the dispossessed." That observation takes on flesh in The Heat of the Day.
The relief in the novel is provided by Stella's 20-year-old son, Roderick, on furlough from the army, and by interludes given over to a sunburned, dreamy young countrywoman named Louie who works in a London factory. Like the innocents in Miss Bowen's early novels, Louie is a creation of pure poetry, but her wandering life is in some ways a lower-class counterpart of Stella's. For both, the enormous, rubble-strewn city is a void in which they own nothing, and both seem to be at the mercy of those who operate for power in the void: Robert Kelway and Harrison on the one hand and newspaper war propaganda (to which Louie becomes touchingly addicted) on the other. Each woman gets a terrible pulling and hauling, but each comes out with something valuable at the end. As for Roderick, he inherits land in Ireland on which after the war he may construct, in his own way, fantasies of an older sort.
It is no wonder that this novel, dense as a poem with symbol and suggestion, should be obscure in one or two places and loose in one or two others. It is nevertheless the strongest work of a writer whose rich and winning gifts, had it not been for a war and a conscience, need never have wrestled with any but private material. The Heat of the Day, for lack of great actors, is not a great novel; but it is one of those rare books that prove that the forces of history are never better understood than when a fine artistic intelligence applies itself to them.