The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

What always confuses me about Elizabeth Bowen is that I don't enjoy her more. This is the third book by her that I've read, and I get the same impression from all of them; the writing is tremendously beautiful, deep and perceptive, really a modernist (late modernist) treasure, but something about it leaves me cold. I don't know what it is, and it frustrates me to no end. It might be that I never really 'believe' the characters; they all strike me as a little odd, a little lopsided. The imagery and language she uses are devastating, yet I find my attention wandering. With this novel, what really unsteadied me is the shifting of pace. It's set during (and after) the Blitz in London and is about a woman who is told that her lover is a spy, passing information to the Nazis. The pace keeps shifting from spy and noir novel pageturner full of struggles over morality and loyalty to sudden modernist explorations of past, present, history, identity, family, love, the usual. It's very hard for me to shift gears like that when I'm reading. However, this is probably my fault. The writing is stunning, and it's one of the most evocative descriptions of London during the Blitz that I have ever read, I feel like I understand the atmosphere, the spirit, the very daily life of people at the time.

Quote:

But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love. Their time sat in the third place at the table. They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day... The relation of people to one another is subject to the relations of each to time, to what is happening... Could these two have loved each other better at a better time? At no other would they have been themselves; what had carried their world to its hour was in their bloodstreams... In dwelling upon the constant for our reassurance, we forget that the loves in history have been agonizingly modern loves in their day. War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that, it was a becoming apparent – but then what else is love?