Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day is a beautiful novel: immersed in it, you do not want to leave it, but to stay encased in the symmetry and clarity of its vision. It is a love story set in wartime London. Stella discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of being a Nazi spy. He himself confesses to sympathy for the German vision of order and rule of law. Stella’s delicately structured world slowly disintegrates.

This story and the strange hues of a summertime city at war give the novel its momentum and texture. There is, however, another level and another love story also at work, one that generates an intense and painful melancholy. This second love story is inarticulate, felt only as a sense of loss, a grieving for something loved and gone. What The Heat of the Day mourns would not have been mourned by many, nor will many today regret its passing. For it anticipates and lingers over the death of the cultural and social supremacy of the English property-owning class. Many of the sons of this class were slaughtered in the First World War, and in the interwar years the Great Depression had depleted their capital, while the existence of the Labour Party had drained their power and political prestige.

Bowen began writing The Heat of the Day in 1944, one year before the Labour landslide in the British general election of 1945. What enriches the text of this novel, enveloping and enlarging the individual stories of loss, is Bowen’s elegy for an era even then already past. — Patricia McManus in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Thanks so much for your donation Vasha!

This book is now part of the 1001-library. If you want to take this book from the library but don't know how to proceed, please refer to the 1001-library bookshelf.

In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen is working with an idea also present in her story "The Demon Lover": 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 Demon Lover" only saw the peril, but The Heat of the Day can see (not without regret) the advantages of freedom also. 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 eight stars because of its clotted style. Sometimes, the phrases provide illumination, but more often they seem like circumlocutions.

Going to EmgeeNL.

Thanks Vasha!

I found the writing quite laborious and detailed. So some parts I just read "diagonal".

On the other hand, the subjects in this story about love, loss, wartime drama set in London in the 1940's, mystery, intrigue and espionage makes it worth while.

This book is now back on the 1001 library bookshelf and can be borrowed by PMing EmgeeNL:)

If you want to take this book from the library but don't know how to proceed, please refer to the library bookshelf.

reserved for bookguide

The book is on it's way

Thank you for sending me this 1001 book, EmgeeNL. I've just read 'A Town Like Alice', which was written in the same period, just after the war. It will be interesting to compare the two, although I can't promise to read it for a few months at least.

I read this in February 2017, but I didn’t write a review at the time. I suspect I had to read another book in time for my book club, then didn’t get back to it. I do remember being somewhat confused by the sheer coldness and lack of passion in somebody who was passionate enough to have love affairs but who never stood up for herself. As I remember, it’s written in that utterly infuriating buttoned-up, uptight English style of the post-war period. Perhaps I should skim-read it again to remind me how I felt about it, but as it is, at the time I gave it a thoroughly unenthusiastic 4 stars and will share a review of someone who undoubtedly has read the book recently enough to say something sensible: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/17/back-pages-elizabeth-bowen-heat-of-the-day-review-archive