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The Harold Wrights are too enlightened to feel superstitious about their new lodgings, but not all of the guests for their first house party are so sure. The weekend winds down as a frightful comedy.
Perhaps the best group of stories in this collection deals with England during World War II, especially London in the blitz. Bowen courageously, stubbornly stayed in her house there, when many friends had taken to the countryside to escape the German bombardment. While the city shook and plaster fell, Bowen collected images and wove them into stories that hauntingly balanced civilization above an abyss. In the Square notes how the bombs were returning London to nature: "The sun, now too low to enter [the square] normally, was able to enter brilliantly at a point where three of the houses had been bombed away; two or three of the may trees, dark with summer, caught on their tops the illicit gold."
In Sunday Afternoon, a man who has stayed on in London visits some friends in the country. He misses "the aesthetic of living" that he and they once shared and finds it hard to explain what the bombing is like: "As it does not connect with the rest of life, it is difficult, you know, to know what one feels. One's feelings seem to have no language for anything so preposterous." Someone present replies, sympathetically, that the blitz "will have no literature."
He was wrong, as the story he appears in proves. Bowen consistently found language for feelings that might otherwise have simply seemed preposterous. She worked artfully to make her work appear unlabored. An apt, if unintended, description of her achievement appears in Ivy Gripped the Steps, one of her finest stories. A young boy visits a seaside resort and marvels at the glittering life he sees:
"Everything was effortless; and, to him, consequently, seemed stamped with style." —By Paul Gray
Excerpt
"Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital —shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs, every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree-darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead."