A review by deegee24
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

4.0

This is not as good as Bowen's earlier novel, The Death of the Heart, which is a masterpiece. But it has many of the same strengths: finely wrought prose, well developed characters (mostly), and probing explorations into complex relationships and historical dilemmas. It depicts WWII London as a place where love, family life, and daily routines are being torn apart by constant bombing and war rationing. News from the front is erratic and hard to place in the proper context. The main character, Stella Rodney, is approached by a man who hints that he is a cointerintelligence officer. He tells her that her lover, a man from an old, aristocratic Protestant Irish family, is spying for the Nazis. The stranger blackmails her: he wants her to dump her lover--without warning him that he's been found out--and become his. The novel unfolds as Stella searches for the truth, weighs what to do, and tries to decide how to reveal a dark secret of her own to her grown son, a soldier who has inherited his uncle's country estate. If you can imagine a cross between Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene, you might get an idea of what this book is like. I found that the subplot about a lonely working-class girl, whose husband is off fighting the war, was a little underdeveloped. And I would have liked Bowen to dig a little deeper into the ethics, politics, and sheer logistics of spying. But Chapter 5 contains one of the most extraordinary descriptions of living in a war zone that I've ever read. This is a book to savor.