The Heat of the Day

"I’ve just been re-reading this novel. It’s such a great book, a noir-ish masterpiece of intrigue and atmosphere. Everyone in the book is such a complex and alluring character. It’s set during the tail end of the Blitz. It starts at the end of 1942, and Elizabeth Bowen started writing it in 1944, so it was written very close to the events that she’s describing in the novel. She hasn’t had the t distance of time. We also know that a lot of it overlapped with Elizabeth Bowen’s own life—the main characters Stella and Robert are the same age as Bowen and her lover. Stella’s home is clearly Elizabeth Bowen’s house in Regent Park. It’s a great novel on its own, but it’s also a kind of eyewitness account of the war. Stella’s lover Robert is a Dunkirk evacuee. He has a limp and a very ambiguous government job that sees him disappear for days on end. He’s accused of selling secrets to the enemy, the Germans. His accuser, Robert Harrison—I don’t know why she called both of her main male characters Robert—blackmails Stella for his silence. It’s wonderful. Bowen has a real cinematic eye for detail. Here’s Stella: She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey. Her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect the greater part of the time in the dusk of her second thoughts. I thought that was wonderful. She’s also really great at relating the inner lives of her characters to their external world. The allegations against Robert burst open Stella’s relationship with him, like a bombed-out building. Elizabeth Bowen is not having to read loads and loads of books on this period or go to the National Archives like I did. She’s just opening her front door and looking at the scene around her."