The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)

The plot of this novel sounds quite exciting -- in a wartime London following the Blitz, Robert, a wounded survivor of Dunkirk who works for the Government, and Stella, a divorced 40-something mother of a soldier, have fallen in love. When Harrison, an obsessed stalker who claims he works for the secret service, tells Stella that her lover is passing secrets to the Nazis, he gives her a choice--his silence to his employers about Robert in exchange for her favors. She is faced with the dilemma of not knowing what to believe or what to do about it.

Sounds like a thriller, right? Well, it's not that at all. Neither is it a love story, although Robert and Stella are supposedly in love. Several subplots have a very tenuous connection with the main narrative, further confusing me about the intent of the author. To tell the truth, I don't know what I am supposed to take away from reading this novel. Maybe something philosophical about choices and how they are influenced by circumstances, especially the uncertainties of war.

What I do know is that the story contains a great deal of dialogue and all of it is stilted and unnatural. I don't believe anybody talked like that, ever, especially not in the 20th Century. The conversations sound as if they were lifted straight out of a Henry James novel. The characters are also very Jamesian, singularly unemotional and cerebral even in the face of death and betrayal. Consequently, they never seem like real people and never elicit any reader empathy or sympathy.

I also know that Bowen's writing style annoys me excessively, as it never flows but jerks along in fits and starts with interjections and asides and inverted order and all sorts of impediments to clarity. Consider this sentence: "One unity, this morning, the empty Sunday street had, up and down its length." This could have read, "This morning the empty Sunday street had one unity up and down its length." I spent a good bit of my time with this book rearranging Bowen's sentences in my head to make them less choppy.

This is a very British novel, very restrained, very subtle, very stylized. I did not enjoy it very much.