Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In November we will be reading The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen for our Love category - who's in?

I'm in. If anyone has Spotify Premium, they have introduced 15 hours of audiobook listening a month at no additional cost so you can now listen to ones which may not be available via library etc. This one is conveniently part of their offering:)

wow. thanks for the tip. I had no idea Spotify had audio books in the service

So I am not sure whether or not I'd recommend this book, but I'm glad I read it. Even if the plot could be summarized as "Woman loves somebody she doesn't know, who turns out to be a fascist all along, and nearly sleeps with the counterspy who wants to turn him in but won't because he wants her to love him, which is never going to happen." In most ways, the plot is not the point.

Hmmm, wasn't overly impressed. Beautiful writing, but hard work and a bit dull.


3 stars out of 5

Here's my GR review:

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I wasn't enamoured with this novel. Bowen's descriptive writing is incredibly beautiful and precise, but I didn't really believe in any of her characters: the dialogue was stilted and stagey, and behaviour was bemusing.

The setting of post-blitz wartime London is a rich one for a writer: Graham Greene used it for The End of the Affair, mining the same promiscuous, anonymous lack of social mores, making social relations faster, deeper, and now fluid.

This seems to me, to be a novel about how we don't really "know" anybody outside ourselves: Stella doesn't know Robert; Roderick doesn't know his mother; nobody knows Harrison.

But I just didn't buy this a lot of the time: this isn't a novel of ideas, it's a live story and a spy novel and wartime fiction and, for me, it fails on this level.

I think, especially, the relationship between Stella and Harrison bemused me the most. Are we expected to presume that the two have had a sexual relationship before (or after) he attempts to blackmail her into dropping Robert for him? To be fair, my copy on the Internet Archive was missing occasional pages and a hint might have been dropped then, but it's the only explanation I can think for his obsession with her and her not telling him to sling his hook as soon as the suggestion is made.

However, I could forgive the unconvincing characters if the whole book wasn't so slow and so dull.

Sorry Bowen, but it was a bit of a slog.

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I agree with Phil that this was a bit of a slog, and I said in my review that I enjoyed it more looking back on it than I did when reading it. At the end, I could see the connections and parallels between characters, and how the themes of identity and truth were underpinning the story, but while reading I got frustrated with all the unnecessary details and the characters talking in riddles to each other.

I did like the wartime setting and there was definitely tension, both between the characters and in London itself. I gave it 3.5*, I could see the positives even if I didn’t like it much.