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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A bildungsroman set during the early years of Ireland's independence. Looks at the decline of the Anglo-Irish class. Queer subtext. Super descriptive, really gorgeous prose. Great.
All of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, at least up to The Heat of the Day, are variations on the theme of the woman of superior sensibility and high breeding who becomes entangled in a liaison with a man of decidedly lower character. Sometimes these men are scoundrels, sometimes spies; sometimes they are merely middle class nonentities whose failure to have brought up in an Anglo-Irish country house with a born aristocrat’s reverence for tradition is a kind of genetic flaw that dooms them to the status of a cipher in the heroines’ romantic lives. (In the most risibly camp of these novels, The Heat of the Day, the villain’s vulgar middle class upbringing, a handicap that does not seem to have predisposed millions of his fellow countrymen to treachery, is imputed to be responsible for his betrayal of his country to the Nazis.) The drama in these novels, such as it is, lies in how far the woman will let herself go in her own debasement before she retreats and cuts the man loose. The men die, not infrequently assisted by the women, who, if they survive these brushes with romantic disaster, resign themselves to a disillusioned celibacy, comforted by the few fragments from their aristocratic upbringings that they have been able to shore against their ruins. Some of them at least still have a country house in County Cork and the ~demesne~, if they haven’t been destroyed by ungrateful Irish peasants.
If The Last September covers the same rather tired territory, it offers the most convincing treatment of this theme, perhaps because here the heroine’s superior sensibility is given a background and historical setting that justifies or at least explains it. In the London novels we are often asked to take the heroines’ refinement, which hangs about them like an expensive perfume, on faith; here, in perhaps the most autobiographical of Bowen’s books, the native environment that has produced the distinctive sensibility of the heroines in her novels is described with thoroughness and canny detail. It is the world of the Anglo-Irish gentry in its decline, in the twilit years just before the loss of its prerogatives: a privileged landed class that maintains fond seigneurial ties with the Irish Catholic peasantry and yet is estranged from it for reasons of religion, money, and cultural identification; a class whose rapport with the English military occupiers sent in to quell native unrest is undermined by a sense of superiority and a half-mutinous sympathy with the Irish militants; a class whose decline is marked not by decadent sexuality and violence but by sterility and anomie. The male representatives of this class in the novel are crusty aging landowners whose authority is largely ceremonial, effete “intellectuals” (a code word for homosexual in this fussily reticent novel) like the heroine’s cousin Laurence, or depressives like the prematurely old Hugo, who is married to an invalid and still emotionally tied to a dead woman with whom he had a pallid, inconclusive romance years ago. There are no children in sight, and no eligible suitors for young women except for the occupying English soldiers, who are portrayed as representatives of a rising English middle class that is acquisitive, coarse, virile but vulgar. (The supercilious Lady Myra insinuates that the family of Gerald, Lois’s suitor, is “in trade.”) Lacking a romantic object worthy of her, Lois, the young heroine, wastes herself on an attachment to a blandly handsome English subaltern that concludes tragically and is then sent to study French abroad. There, one imagines, she will become another one of Bowen’s female exiles, cut adrift from the culture and setting that in another era might have brought her romantic fulfillment, making do with paltry affairs that turn unexpectedly tragic (repetitions of her earlier erotic trauma)—completing the backstory, in emotional terms if not in historical specifics, of the heroines of Bowen’s later novels.
If the theme and concerns of the novel seem antiquated (the decline of a landowning family, the passing of an agrarian world, the rise of a crass mercantile class), the language is consistently striking and innovative, and justifies Bowen’s inclusion with the modernists with whom she is somewhat uncomfortably associated. Though Virginia Woolf may have done more to liberate the novel from its Edwardian straightjacketing, Bowen’s language has always struck me as more innovative, free of the Victorian mustiness that I sometimes detect in the prose of the more celebrated novelist. The great heir of James in both her visual sense and in her mediumistic alertness to the unspoken, she writes a prose that is “impressionistic” in the best sense—not a blurry mist of painterly phrases, but an innovative and piercing language that makes the shifting currents of feeling between people visible and all that is withheld explicit. Aside from James, is there another novelist with a higher EQ? The most striking aspect of Bowen’s work is this marriage of a boldly experimental style with an essentially conservative temperament and political outlook. It is a combination that has unjustly relegated her to the status of minor “woman’s novelist,” a chronicler of stifled drawing room passions and stoically borne, ladylike suffering.
Later on in her career, this style--which always shrank from contact with the carnal, the coarse, any dimension of human experience, in fact, that could not be set in an elegantly appointed drawing room—turned precious and mannered; the plots become increasingly preoccupied with the past: ghosts, old houses, discovered letters from dead lovers. (This is not true of her final novel, Eva Trout, a bold attempt to grapple with the unruly late 20th-century reality that most of her work studiously excludes). In the same way that Bowen’s highborn heroines fail to find fulfillment in a worthy man, Bowen’s beautiful style never did quite manage, it could be said, to find a subject worthy of it.
If The Last September covers the same rather tired territory, it offers the most convincing treatment of this theme, perhaps because here the heroine’s superior sensibility is given a background and historical setting that justifies or at least explains it. In the London novels we are often asked to take the heroines’ refinement, which hangs about them like an expensive perfume, on faith; here, in perhaps the most autobiographical of Bowen’s books, the native environment that has produced the distinctive sensibility of the heroines in her novels is described with thoroughness and canny detail. It is the world of the Anglo-Irish gentry in its decline, in the twilit years just before the loss of its prerogatives: a privileged landed class that maintains fond seigneurial ties with the Irish Catholic peasantry and yet is estranged from it for reasons of religion, money, and cultural identification; a class whose rapport with the English military occupiers sent in to quell native unrest is undermined by a sense of superiority and a half-mutinous sympathy with the Irish militants; a class whose decline is marked not by decadent sexuality and violence but by sterility and anomie. The male representatives of this class in the novel are crusty aging landowners whose authority is largely ceremonial, effete “intellectuals” (a code word for homosexual in this fussily reticent novel) like the heroine’s cousin Laurence, or depressives like the prematurely old Hugo, who is married to an invalid and still emotionally tied to a dead woman with whom he had a pallid, inconclusive romance years ago. There are no children in sight, and no eligible suitors for young women except for the occupying English soldiers, who are portrayed as representatives of a rising English middle class that is acquisitive, coarse, virile but vulgar. (The supercilious Lady Myra insinuates that the family of Gerald, Lois’s suitor, is “in trade.”) Lacking a romantic object worthy of her, Lois, the young heroine, wastes herself on an attachment to a blandly handsome English subaltern that concludes tragically and is then sent to study French abroad. There, one imagines, she will become another one of Bowen’s female exiles, cut adrift from the culture and setting that in another era might have brought her romantic fulfillment, making do with paltry affairs that turn unexpectedly tragic (repetitions of her earlier erotic trauma)—completing the backstory, in emotional terms if not in historical specifics, of the heroines of Bowen’s later novels.
If the theme and concerns of the novel seem antiquated (the decline of a landowning family, the passing of an agrarian world, the rise of a crass mercantile class), the language is consistently striking and innovative, and justifies Bowen’s inclusion with the modernists with whom she is somewhat uncomfortably associated. Though Virginia Woolf may have done more to liberate the novel from its Edwardian straightjacketing, Bowen’s language has always struck me as more innovative, free of the Victorian mustiness that I sometimes detect in the prose of the more celebrated novelist. The great heir of James in both her visual sense and in her mediumistic alertness to the unspoken, she writes a prose that is “impressionistic” in the best sense—not a blurry mist of painterly phrases, but an innovative and piercing language that makes the shifting currents of feeling between people visible and all that is withheld explicit. Aside from James, is there another novelist with a higher EQ? The most striking aspect of Bowen’s work is this marriage of a boldly experimental style with an essentially conservative temperament and political outlook. It is a combination that has unjustly relegated her to the status of minor “woman’s novelist,” a chronicler of stifled drawing room passions and stoically borne, ladylike suffering.
Later on in her career, this style--which always shrank from contact with the carnal, the coarse, any dimension of human experience, in fact, that could not be set in an elegantly appointed drawing room—turned precious and mannered; the plots become increasingly preoccupied with the past: ghosts, old houses, discovered letters from dead lovers. (This is not true of her final novel, Eva Trout, a bold attempt to grapple with the unruly late 20th-century reality that most of her work studiously excludes). In the same way that Bowen’s highborn heroines fail to find fulfillment in a worthy man, Bowen’s beautiful style never did quite manage, it could be said, to find a subject worthy of it.
So many mixed feelings about this one. For once, it was difficult to understand at times what had actually happened, especially that the characters tend to say things to each other, a continuation of their inner monologues, rather than actually talk and interpersonal connection seems impossible. And you know, they have their tea parties, tennis matches and even a dance, but there is a war going on, from which atrocities one cannot fully escape.
This book had some of the strangest prose I ever read. There were times I still wasn't sure what happened, even after reading a section several times. And I wasn't crazy about the ending, at least what I think happened at the ending . . . Kind of a strange book.
Just arrived from USA through BM.
A mild story, social comedy combined with private tragedy, of an Irish family in County Cork (1920).
From BBC radio 4 Extra:
Episode 1 of 2
1920, Danielstown, County Cork. Lois is poised on the brink of womanhood. She dances and flirts with English officers, but they do not always return from patrols.
Elizabeth Bowen's 1929 novel dramatised in two-parts by Nigel Gearing.
Lois ... Anna Healy
Gerald ... Greg Wise
Lady Myra ... Carmel McSharry
Sir Richard ... Denys Hawthorne
Marda ... Frances Tomelty
Hugo ... Billy Boyle
Francis ... Janet Maw
Livvy ... Anna Livia Ryan
David ... Robert Harper
Laurence ... J D Kelleher
Daventry ... Dorian Lough
Director: Claire Grove
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 1996.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008q24
A mild story, social comedy combined with private tragedy, of an Irish family in County Cork (1920).
From BBC radio 4 Extra:
Episode 1 of 2
1920, Danielstown, County Cork. Lois is poised on the brink of womanhood. She dances and flirts with English officers, but they do not always return from patrols.
Elizabeth Bowen's 1929 novel dramatised in two-parts by Nigel Gearing.
Lois ... Anna Healy
Gerald ... Greg Wise
Lady Myra ... Carmel McSharry
Sir Richard ... Denys Hawthorne
Marda ... Frances Tomelty
Hugo ... Billy Boyle
Francis ... Janet Maw
Livvy ... Anna Livia Ryan
David ... Robert Harper
Laurence ... J D Kelleher
Daventry ... Dorian Lough
Director: Claire Grove
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 1996.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008q24
Brutal, fascinating, inspiring. I picked it up for a break from covid but forgot the book has an atmosphere of descending doom which is not very restful. But so brilliantly written that I'm glad I read it anyway. All the 'action' takes place offstage in the last three or four pages but somehow she's created this mood of tension in a series of scenes where almost nothing happens. How does she do it?! It's extraordinary
NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK UNTIL THE LAST 15 PAGES AND IT WILL KILL YOU. I've found a new love for Bowen, whom I've never read before, but who reminds me a great deal of Betty Smith, one of my favorite authors. I don't know how I feel about reading stuffy novels about the Protestant ascendancy class in Ireland, but the protagonist of this novel, Lois, was interesting and unsure and self-conscious and I loved following her through her days of doing literally nothing besides debate whether or not she should marry Gerald (who is an English soldier and therefore an improper marriage option) and play tennis. Plus you get a bunch of eerie Gothic descriptions of the house and the landscape, and I'm always down for a good sort-of ghost story.
