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gh7's review against another edition
5.0
Objectively this is probably a four star book but I’m going the full hog because of how much relentless pleasure it gave me, not least of all because of its laugh-out-loud humour and original and wholly compelling cast of characters. It took Elizabeth Bowen a long time, until her last two books, to try her hand at a full blown comic novel and boy does she do it well. (The inept introduction makes the extraordinary claim that in this novel Bowen abandons comedy.)
Eva Trout, an orphaned heiress, cannot find her feet in the world. She’s a familiar Bowen heroine, the bluster of her unschooled innocence creating havoc wherever she goes. Few writers do children better than Bowen and this is again the case here. She gets that wondrous x-ray tilt children put on things. Iseult, her former teacher, is a fabulous portrait of the disillusioned clever woman who has married beneath herself and Constantine, her lawful guardian, is one of Bowen’s best ever creations.
It’s purposely overwritten (see the quote below about a day in Cambridge) but in a mischievous and consistently mannered way which wages its own private war on cliché. Bowen, you can tell, hates clichés and often mocks them by turning them on their head or inserting them into a sentence or passage which is grammatically bizarre. “But absence,” he wheedled, “makes the heart grow fonder. It’s completely unheard of that it should fail to.” There’s barely a sentence in this novel anyone else could have written – with, maybe, the exception of late Henry James who she pays homage to with her contorted sentence structures. Fitting that the leading male is called Henry.
On a social level the novel can be read as a depiction of England’s uneasy transition from the pastoral into modernity– there’s the village vicarage which becomes a kind of foundation stone for Eva and contains in atmosphere the inexpensive reassurances of the 19th century; this is counterpointed by the sexually predatory charlatan Constantine (Eva’s dead father’s lover) in his high rise office who, though super rich, has no job title. Eva herself finds sanctuary in the vicarage until the inevitable expulsion. She then fills her new home with all the inventions of modernity. The old world priest is replaced by a succession of faith healers, art therapists and new age ministers. When these fail her she is drawn back to the past which takes the form of a visit to the National Portrait Gallery where she goes from the Tudors to the Stuarts through to the Victorians in an effort to find out how much identity can be found in a face. Not much, she concludes, still trying to find her own face.
My love for this book was further increased by my familiarity with its settings – fantastic evocations of Paris and especially London which enabled me to see the familiar anew; and the description of Chicago where she goes to buy a child on the black market reminded me of my own trip there as a child when I felt the full force of its aggressive insistence on the future, its alienating and dwarfing rejection of every yesterday.
The novel also pays lip service to psychoanalytic ideas of its time, which act as a kind of hidden floorplan. The child Eva buys is a deaf mute which offers Bowen exuberant opportunity to explore the world of alternative healing. Every relationship here is subjected to a psychological autopsy. We seem decades further up the line from Virginia Woolf when in fact only twenty years have transpired. Bowen is confronting modernity with a razor sharp eye for satiric detail, but without the wistful sentimentalised nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited, and a hair-triggered sensibility alert to both the beauty and absurdity of the worlds in which Eva finds herself. One of the things that makes this so fascinating is that it’s the work of a writer precipitated out of her own era into a new one – the 1960s. She’s as tenderly affectionate as she is scathingly mocking and it was this subtle and difficult tightrope act that helped make this novel so loveable, that and its high tide imaginative vitality, awesomely impressive for a seventy year old woman.
Eva Trout, an orphaned heiress, cannot find her feet in the world. She’s a familiar Bowen heroine, the bluster of her unschooled innocence creating havoc wherever she goes. Few writers do children better than Bowen and this is again the case here. She gets that wondrous x-ray tilt children put on things. Iseult, her former teacher, is a fabulous portrait of the disillusioned clever woman who has married beneath herself and Constantine, her lawful guardian, is one of Bowen’s best ever creations.
It’s purposely overwritten (see the quote below about a day in Cambridge) but in a mischievous and consistently mannered way which wages its own private war on cliché. Bowen, you can tell, hates clichés and often mocks them by turning them on their head or inserting them into a sentence or passage which is grammatically bizarre. “But absence,” he wheedled, “makes the heart grow fonder. It’s completely unheard of that it should fail to.” There’s barely a sentence in this novel anyone else could have written – with, maybe, the exception of late Henry James who she pays homage to with her contorted sentence structures. Fitting that the leading male is called Henry.
On a social level the novel can be read as a depiction of England’s uneasy transition from the pastoral into modernity– there’s the village vicarage which becomes a kind of foundation stone for Eva and contains in atmosphere the inexpensive reassurances of the 19th century; this is counterpointed by the sexually predatory charlatan Constantine (Eva’s dead father’s lover) in his high rise office who, though super rich, has no job title. Eva herself finds sanctuary in the vicarage until the inevitable expulsion. She then fills her new home with all the inventions of modernity. The old world priest is replaced by a succession of faith healers, art therapists and new age ministers. When these fail her she is drawn back to the past which takes the form of a visit to the National Portrait Gallery where she goes from the Tudors to the Stuarts through to the Victorians in an effort to find out how much identity can be found in a face. Not much, she concludes, still trying to find her own face.
My love for this book was further increased by my familiarity with its settings – fantastic evocations of Paris and especially London which enabled me to see the familiar anew; and the description of Chicago where she goes to buy a child on the black market reminded me of my own trip there as a child when I felt the full force of its aggressive insistence on the future, its alienating and dwarfing rejection of every yesterday.
The novel also pays lip service to psychoanalytic ideas of its time, which act as a kind of hidden floorplan. The child Eva buys is a deaf mute which offers Bowen exuberant opportunity to explore the world of alternative healing. Every relationship here is subjected to a psychological autopsy. We seem decades further up the line from Virginia Woolf when in fact only twenty years have transpired. Bowen is confronting modernity with a razor sharp eye for satiric detail, but without the wistful sentimentalised nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited, and a hair-triggered sensibility alert to both the beauty and absurdity of the worlds in which Eva finds herself. One of the things that makes this so fascinating is that it’s the work of a writer precipitated out of her own era into a new one – the 1960s. She’s as tenderly affectionate as she is scathingly mocking and it was this subtle and difficult tightrope act that helped make this novel so loveable, that and its high tide imaginative vitality, awesomely impressive for a seventy year old woman.
cnyreader's review against another edition
3.0
Eva Trout is a socially awkward woman, with not enough education and too much money. She can't seem to settle anywhere, and when she comes back from America with a child who is deaf and mute, nothing is really different. She seems to try to connect with the few constant people in her life, but is it ever really successful?
This was a strange book and I don't feel like I really get it. I read a couple reviews and commentaries immediately after finishing it, and I'm not the only one who felt that way. Everything feels veiled, like Bowen can't just come out with what she means, and maybe that's part of the story, but it was frustrating.
Food: lukewarm, underseasoned potato salad. It needs to be a little more something- cold, hot, salty, spicy, SOMEthing. It's okay to chew on, but not great.
This was a strange book and I don't feel like I really get it. I read a couple reviews and commentaries immediately after finishing it, and I'm not the only one who felt that way. Everything feels veiled, like Bowen can't just come out with what she means, and maybe that's part of the story, but it was frustrating.
Food: lukewarm, underseasoned potato salad. It needs to be a little more something- cold, hot, salty, spicy, SOMEthing. It's okay to chew on, but not great.
readerstephen86's review against another edition
4.0
SUMMARY - 20 years on since I read my only previous Bowen novel, I've been bewitched again - this novel about the 'rootless rich' (p. 191) glows with murky energy.
■○□○□○■
This is an optic novel in its attention to light and shade, just as it is a novel of opacity to the lives of Eva and her extended adopted family. Bowen's cinematic prose lights up the darkly disordered and unreachable realities of her characters. Eva feels everything surprising, and disconnected from reality. There are shafts of light when Eva makes declarations of intent to befriend or to woo, which are all too often swiftly eclipsed. I like the modernist refusal to allow narrative neatness. Eva, Constantine, Iseult, Clive, Henry and others largely don't understand one another. Letters are often written to offer disclosure, but don't arrive. In conversation, minds often struggle to escape the cranial wall, and remain in darkness to others' thoughts and feelings.
Bowen stands apart from the vast majority of novelists I've read in her ability to cast vistas, and diffuse her prose with effortless ambiance. Seeing the lake-perched castle through Eva's eyes, I felt myself breathing-in sharply chilled air. Equally, there was a vividness in the flourescent-lit city office in all its plastic artificiality; the paper-strewn vestry, or Eva's firelit twilight in her first home.
The ending (no spoiler) was to me less surprising than to Tessa Hadley, who writes the Introduction in this edition. I sped up towards the end partly because I started to anticipate the conclusion, and perhaps Eva Trout lost some of its final punchiness in consequence. Even so, there was an element of uncertainty that made this less unsatisfying in its turncoat neatness that it might have done. The clipped and occasional snipey conversation was also much less grating than say Nina Bowden's novel (shortlisted retrospectively for the follow year's Lost Booker Prize), but just occasionally breached believability even for those who knew each other.
These are among very few reasons I can give why it's not a 5 from me. The main reason is that irrepressable upwelling of feeling that I get at the end of novels I've adored. Eva Trout in its strangeness, and perhaps for its intellectually perverse intent, didn't quite prompt such devotion on a first reading. However, I would definitely re-read, and wonder if its realism could capture my heart fully on a second attempt.
Certainly the dead endings (e.gs , the love letter on the plane, or quickly forgotten impromtu school reunion in the US), far from interruptions, brought a jostling reality to the ordered chaos of unplanned human existence. Perhaps its the refreshment this brings after my recent forays into the meticulously-plotted world of Dickens, but I did love the unpredictability of the interplay between characters that never fully comprehend each other.
With the head if not fully the heart, this book is a delight. I read it more slowly than most books. Some books drag; but Bowen's prose feels like it needs to be sipped, not swallowed. Apparently Bowen was experimenting (in this late, indeed last novel), and contorted sentences to lay bare the obscurities of language and comprehension. Instead of grating, this time the circumlocutions felt playful. The language reached deep into the dictionary while, and was sometimes extraordinary, but rarely felt forced: trefoil; anglepoise; Stygian; crepitate; dewlaps; napery; dolichpcelaphic (p. 194) and superogatory (p.243). Bowen rows her course well clear of cliche.
It ia 20 years (pretty much to the month) since I read my first - and until Eva Trout - only Bowen novel, 'The Heat of the Day', as an undergraduate. Now Bowen's lucidly-illuminated work and worlds awaits for me to dive in, and I can't wait.
■○□○□○■
This is an optic novel in its attention to light and shade, just as it is a novel of opacity to the lives of Eva and her extended adopted family. Bowen's cinematic prose lights up the darkly disordered and unreachable realities of her characters. Eva feels everything surprising, and disconnected from reality. There are shafts of light when Eva makes declarations of intent to befriend or to woo, which are all too often swiftly eclipsed. I like the modernist refusal to allow narrative neatness. Eva, Constantine, Iseult, Clive, Henry and others largely don't understand one another. Letters are often written to offer disclosure, but don't arrive. In conversation, minds often struggle to escape the cranial wall, and remain in darkness to others' thoughts and feelings.
Bowen stands apart from the vast majority of novelists I've read in her ability to cast vistas, and diffuse her prose with effortless ambiance. Seeing the lake-perched castle through Eva's eyes, I felt myself breathing-in sharply chilled air. Equally, there was a vividness in the flourescent-lit city office in all its plastic artificiality; the paper-strewn vestry, or Eva's firelit twilight in her first home.
The ending (no spoiler) was to me less surprising than to Tessa Hadley, who writes the Introduction in this edition. I sped up towards the end partly because I started to anticipate the conclusion, and perhaps Eva Trout lost some of its final punchiness in consequence. Even so, there was an element of uncertainty that made this less unsatisfying in its turncoat neatness that it might have done. The clipped and occasional snipey conversation was also much less grating than say Nina Bowden's novel (shortlisted retrospectively for the follow year's Lost Booker Prize), but just occasionally breached believability even for those who knew each other.
These are among very few reasons I can give why it's not a 5 from me. The main reason is that irrepressable upwelling of feeling that I get at the end of novels I've adored. Eva Trout in its strangeness, and perhaps for its intellectually perverse intent, didn't quite prompt such devotion on a first reading. However, I would definitely re-read, and wonder if its realism could capture my heart fully on a second attempt.
Certainly the dead endings (e.gs , the love letter on the plane, or quickly forgotten impromtu school reunion in the US), far from interruptions, brought a jostling reality to the ordered chaos of unplanned human existence. Perhaps its the refreshment this brings after my recent forays into the meticulously-plotted world of Dickens, but I did love the unpredictability of the interplay between characters that never fully comprehend each other.
With the head if not fully the heart, this book is a delight. I read it more slowly than most books. Some books drag; but Bowen's prose feels like it needs to be sipped, not swallowed. Apparently Bowen was experimenting (in this late, indeed last novel), and contorted sentences to lay bare the obscurities of language and comprehension. Instead of grating, this time the circumlocutions felt playful. The language reached deep into the dictionary while, and was sometimes extraordinary, but rarely felt forced: trefoil; anglepoise; Stygian; crepitate; dewlaps; napery; dolichpcelaphic (p. 194) and superogatory (p.243). Bowen rows her course well clear of cliche.
It ia 20 years (pretty much to the month) since I read my first - and until Eva Trout - only Bowen novel, 'The Heat of the Day', as an undergraduate. Now Bowen's lucidly-illuminated work and worlds awaits for me to dive in, and I can't wait.
kathleenitpdx's review against another edition
4.0
The blurb on the edition of this book I have says "Bowen is magnificent when she writes about...ambiguity" (Margaret Drabble). Ambiguity is right! The reader has no idea what is going on in the first scene. Each passing scene becomes a bit clearer until the last scene is crystal clear. But the whole book leaves you with a thousand unanswered questions. And, yet, the questions are not as demanding as you would have guessed half way through.
A young woman (Eva Trout), who grew up motherless and was dragged around the world by her father, who has now also died, is living with a former teacher and her husband in a small English village. She will soon take control of her considerable fortune. But how does someone who has grown up without family or affection find either?
Bowen's dialog is very stilted. Philosophy professors may write letters that sound like the one in the book but I don't think that English people spoke this way in the 60's.
A young woman (Eva Trout), who grew up motherless and was dragged around the world by her father, who has now also died, is living with a former teacher and her husband in a small English village. She will soon take control of her considerable fortune. But how does someone who has grown up without family or affection find either?
Bowen's dialog is very stilted. Philosophy professors may write letters that sound like the one in the book but I don't think that English people spoke this way in the 60's.
lnatal's review against another edition
4.0
This is the story of an orphaned girl who lost her mother in a crash airplane accident. She is raised by his father and after his death, by her solicitor, Constantine.
During her whole life, she tries to get her own free life even if she is not to grown up in doing that. Her inheritance will help to disengage from the Dancey's influence.
This is a psychological romance in the sense that it shows how Eva managed to arrive in her adulthood even if she has to pay a high price for it.
During her whole life, she tries to get her own free life even if she is not to grown up in doing that. Her inheritance will help to disengage from the Dancey's influence.
This is a psychological romance in the sense that it shows how Eva managed to arrive in her adulthood even if she has to pay a high price for it.
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