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The Last September
The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.
In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching—the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.
In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching—the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.
303 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
About the author
Elizabeth Bowen
197 books458 followersElizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.
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April 12, 2020I love to find mention of books within other books.
So it was that when I recently read The Awkward Age by Henry James, I paid particular attention to a blue-covered novel that had one of the characters' names inscribed in it. I watched as the novel was passed around, influencing the fate of several characters in the process, and rewarding me for paying attention. That episode reminded me of other stories in which books within books had moved the plot along: A Room with a View, for example, where a red-covered novel abandoned in a garden changes the course of the heroine's life.
A novel gets passed from one character to another in The Last September too, and though there's no name inscribed on it - as was the case with the blue-covered book in 'The Awkward Age' - there is a discussion about such an inscription, which has to be an interesting coincidence.
However, in spite of that coincidence, I wasn't immediately reminded of 'The Last September' when I was thinking about books that play roles in other books. If I reached up to the book shelf the other day, where Elizabeth Bowen is perched between William Trevor and Molly Keane, it was because a character trapped on the threshold of adulthood in 'The Awkward Age' had reminded me of a similar character in Bowen's novel. I had only intended to remind myself of the character's name (Lois Farquar, as it turns out), but I ended up rereading the novel all the way through. And what a pleasure it was, from the opening to the closing sentences! I remember liking it when I first read it but I enjoyed it even more second time round. Perhaps reading so much Henry James recently has helped me appreciate Elizabeth Bowen's early twentieth century style better.
I enjoyed the subtle foreshadowing: Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered.
I noted the amount of things that are implied or left unsaid: There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be rather painfully not said.
But I particularly savoured the descriptions: Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper.
In fact Bowen writes as if she's painting a picture or, better still, making a very beautiful film.
How's this for an opening shot:
About six o'clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement onto the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out from a net of shadow, down the slope to the house.
As greetings are exchanged with the long-awaited visitors, Bowen turns her camera on Lois, standing apart from the rest of the characters:
In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through with a view to appearance, appeared over their shoulders. So that Lois stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her; above, the vast façade of the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns...The car with the luggage turned and went around the back, deeply scoring the gravel..She wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always...
Bowen has frozen that moment perfectly. The crisp white skirt and the muslin blouse will never yellow with age, and future readers will hear again the motor's roar coming through the tunnel of trees, the crunch of those heavy tyres on the gravel.
Though I've referenced film and camera angles, I know they are only metaphors. The film is playing on the page before our eyes; the words are doing the job of the camera. And just as in the best movies, the themes of the entire novel are flagged in the opening scene. The girl, though on the verge of adulthood, is isolated from the others because she's not yet married, not yet initiated into adult secrets; she is more comfortable with the dogs than with the visitors, though she's painfully self-conscious and awkward about that verdant verge she's isolated upon.
And the house, which is as much a main character as Lois herself, has its future outlined in two simple words: stared coldly. They are a chilly breath from the future: this is the last September of Lois's innocence and the last September the house will welcome visitors.
You'll have to read the book yourself to see how artfully Elizabeth Bowen fills in the story she has sketched in that powerful opening.
But what about the book within the book, I hear you say? What was its significance?
As was the case with the blue-covered novel in the Henry James book I mentioned earlier, the book in this story was relevant to the theme of the innocence of girls of an awkward age. Lois's cousin Laurence gives the book, not to Lois, but to a more sophisticated family friend. Alhough he is not much older than Lois, Laurence treats his cousin like a silly child and wouldn't dream of giving her a book that might corrupt her. Bowen frequently uses Laurence to contrast the freedoms young men enjoy with the restrictions placed on young women like Lois. At the end of September, Laurence will continue his studies at Oxford but, at least at the start of the book, nothing so purposeful awaits Lois - she has no university studies to return to, no plans for any future occupation. She's adrift.
…………………...............
Though he isn't present in many scenes in the book, and the point of view mostly belongs to Lois or to certain other characters, Bowen still gives Laurence some great lines, including this little speech which nicely wraps up the themes of this review: Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from the bridge at Parson's Pleasure. It was a gold one, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks...It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James...
……………………………………………
The book Laurence didn't give Lois had another significance which I couldn't have guessed until I started reading it. Yes, I immediately bought Laurence's book after I'd finished 'The Last September' and right now I'm a third of the way through it.
I'll fill you in on the further significances I discovered when I finish it. It's called South Wind and it's by Norman Douglas .
………………
Later edit. I finished South Wind. Wow!
So it was that when I recently read The Awkward Age by Henry James, I paid particular attention to a blue-covered novel that had one of the characters' names inscribed in it. I watched as the novel was passed around, influencing the fate of several characters in the process, and rewarding me for paying attention. That episode reminded me of other stories in which books within books had moved the plot along: A Room with a View, for example, where a red-covered novel abandoned in a garden changes the course of the heroine's life.
A novel gets passed from one character to another in The Last September too, and though there's no name inscribed on it - as was the case with the blue-covered book in 'The Awkward Age' - there is a discussion about such an inscription, which has to be an interesting coincidence.
However, in spite of that coincidence, I wasn't immediately reminded of 'The Last September' when I was thinking about books that play roles in other books. If I reached up to the book shelf the other day, where Elizabeth Bowen is perched between William Trevor and Molly Keane, it was because a character trapped on the threshold of adulthood in 'The Awkward Age' had reminded me of a similar character in Bowen's novel. I had only intended to remind myself of the character's name (Lois Farquar, as it turns out), but I ended up rereading the novel all the way through. And what a pleasure it was, from the opening to the closing sentences! I remember liking it when I first read it but I enjoyed it even more second time round. Perhaps reading so much Henry James recently has helped me appreciate Elizabeth Bowen's early twentieth century style better.
I enjoyed the subtle foreshadowing: Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered.
I noted the amount of things that are implied or left unsaid: There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be rather painfully not said.
But I particularly savoured the descriptions: Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper.
In fact Bowen writes as if she's painting a picture or, better still, making a very beautiful film.
How's this for an opening shot:
About six o'clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement onto the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out from a net of shadow, down the slope to the house.
As greetings are exchanged with the long-awaited visitors, Bowen turns her camera on Lois, standing apart from the rest of the characters:
In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through with a view to appearance, appeared over their shoulders. So that Lois stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her; above, the vast façade of the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns...The car with the luggage turned and went around the back, deeply scoring the gravel..She wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always...
Bowen has frozen that moment perfectly. The crisp white skirt and the muslin blouse will never yellow with age, and future readers will hear again the motor's roar coming through the tunnel of trees, the crunch of those heavy tyres on the gravel.
Though I've referenced film and camera angles, I know they are only metaphors. The film is playing on the page before our eyes; the words are doing the job of the camera. And just as in the best movies, the themes of the entire novel are flagged in the opening scene. The girl, though on the verge of adulthood, is isolated from the others because she's not yet married, not yet initiated into adult secrets; she is more comfortable with the dogs than with the visitors, though she's painfully self-conscious and awkward about that verdant verge she's isolated upon.
And the house, which is as much a main character as Lois herself, has its future outlined in two simple words: stared coldly. They are a chilly breath from the future: this is the last September of Lois's innocence and the last September the house will welcome visitors.
You'll have to read the book yourself to see how artfully Elizabeth Bowen fills in the story she has sketched in that powerful opening.
But what about the book within the book, I hear you say? What was its significance?
As was the case with the blue-covered novel in the Henry James book I mentioned earlier, the book in this story was relevant to the theme of the innocence of girls of an awkward age. Lois's cousin Laurence gives the book, not to Lois, but to a more sophisticated family friend. Alhough he is not much older than Lois, Laurence treats his cousin like a silly child and wouldn't dream of giving her a book that might corrupt her. Bowen frequently uses Laurence to contrast the freedoms young men enjoy with the restrictions placed on young women like Lois. At the end of September, Laurence will continue his studies at Oxford but, at least at the start of the book, nothing so purposeful awaits Lois - she has no university studies to return to, no plans for any future occupation. She's adrift.
…………………...............
Though he isn't present in many scenes in the book, and the point of view mostly belongs to Lois or to certain other characters, Bowen still gives Laurence some great lines, including this little speech which nicely wraps up the themes of this review: Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from the bridge at Parson's Pleasure. It was a gold one, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks...It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James...
……………………………………………
The book Laurence didn't give Lois had another significance which I couldn't have guessed until I started reading it. Yes, I immediately bought Laurence's book after I'd finished 'The Last September' and right now I'm a third of the way through it.
I'll fill you in on the further significances I discovered when I finish it. It's called South Wind and it's by Norman Douglas .
………………
Later edit. I finished South Wind. Wow!
April 24, 2019
"Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications."
Isn't that the perfect definition of ordinary life, lived by ordinary people who have no potential for heroism or martyrdom, but who consider their small complications important enough to care about them and to take necessary action to secure their status quo or to change it, according to need?
The tragedy of The Last September lies in the fact that the reader knows the characters live at a time and place, the Troubles in Ireland, where ordinary life is a luxury most people can't afford. Tragedy is lurking in the shadows, while the tennis parties take place in beautiful mansions and gossip about engagements and love affairs spread like a symbolic fire. The characters read the Manns - another hint at the fact that their cultural setting is doomed, on the last chapter, ready to sink in the reality of 20th century violence.
The tragedy also lies in the lighthearted humour with which small arguments are settled:
"Miss Norton will have to change."
"Hugo, how COULD you let her get so wet!"
"My dear, I am not an umbrella."
As long as that is the worst of concerns, it hardly matters that Lois, the young woman whose budding love story is the centre piece of the plot, is not equipped with much courage. There is no need for it.
But as the calm non-action proceeds, so does time, and the clock of history ticks louder and louder:
"The world did not stand still, though the household at Danielstown and the Thompsons' lunch party took no account of it."
Once the tragedy strikes, though, they all immediately know that "The Last September" will be a dividing line in their lives. And they accept the loss with the needed amount of courage, which apparently is only distributed when it is required.
There are many such times in my own life that I retrospectively remember as a clear cut with the past. Chernobyl in 1986, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, 9/11 in 2001, or Brexit and the US election in 2016. They all have that in common that they broke into my ordinary life and forced me to see the outside world despite my wish for ordinariness and calm.
Bowen catches this calm life before the storm brilliantly, adding no additional drama to the lives of the characters of the plot, thus making the tension in the reader rise by contrast. One feels like an omniscient, yet completely powerless god watching the destruction of a flawed and yet beautiful way of life.
Recommended!
Isn't that the perfect definition of ordinary life, lived by ordinary people who have no potential for heroism or martyrdom, but who consider their small complications important enough to care about them and to take necessary action to secure their status quo or to change it, according to need?
The tragedy of The Last September lies in the fact that the reader knows the characters live at a time and place, the Troubles in Ireland, where ordinary life is a luxury most people can't afford. Tragedy is lurking in the shadows, while the tennis parties take place in beautiful mansions and gossip about engagements and love affairs spread like a symbolic fire. The characters read the Manns - another hint at the fact that their cultural setting is doomed, on the last chapter, ready to sink in the reality of 20th century violence.
The tragedy also lies in the lighthearted humour with which small arguments are settled:
"Miss Norton will have to change."
"Hugo, how COULD you let her get so wet!"
"My dear, I am not an umbrella."
As long as that is the worst of concerns, it hardly matters that Lois, the young woman whose budding love story is the centre piece of the plot, is not equipped with much courage. There is no need for it.
But as the calm non-action proceeds, so does time, and the clock of history ticks louder and louder:
"The world did not stand still, though the household at Danielstown and the Thompsons' lunch party took no account of it."
Once the tragedy strikes, though, they all immediately know that "The Last September" will be a dividing line in their lives. And they accept the loss with the needed amount of courage, which apparently is only distributed when it is required.
There are many such times in my own life that I retrospectively remember as a clear cut with the past. Chernobyl in 1986, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, 9/11 in 2001, or Brexit and the US election in 2016. They all have that in common that they broke into my ordinary life and forced me to see the outside world despite my wish for ordinariness and calm.
Bowen catches this calm life before the storm brilliantly, adding no additional drama to the lives of the characters of the plot, thus making the tension in the reader rise by contrast. One feels like an omniscient, yet completely powerless god watching the destruction of a flawed and yet beautiful way of life.
Recommended!
December 31, 2018
This novel was first published in 1929, one of the classics of literature of the time, and my first experience with Elizabeth Bowen’s writing.
One of the first things I found interesting was the great care the author took in keeping the story relatively dispassionate throughout. In doing so, she reflected the attitudes of the people she wrote about, and the times they lived in.
It is Ireland, “between the wars”; a time when England had sent out the “Black and Tans” with the expressed purpose of keeping law and order in a country experiencing many internal battles. History tells us this was a mistake, although who really knows. Things did not end well, but it is impossible to say if they would have ended better had Ireland been allowed to sort through their civil wars on their own.
This story is about relationships: relatives, relatives of relatives, friends and their relatives. It is also about a family whose roots are deeply Irish, yet they are part of the aristocracy and possibly the roots of their roots were English.
It was fascinating to listen in on their conversations: talking at, past, or through each other. Sometimes, two people would hold an entire conversation where each is expressing responses to their individual thoughts rather than to the words of other person. And there were many of these conversations. The hosts, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, Lois (Sir Richard’s niece), and Lawrence (Lady Naylor’s nephew) had house guests through the summer and into September.
There were parties: garden parties, tennis parties, and even dances for the young people where young ladies were hand-picked and invited as dance partners for the young subalterns in their own small town of huts and barracks.
Everyone, including the militia, seemed to ignore the skirmishes that broke out from time to time. For some, it was beneath their notice; for others it was a condition they preferred to forget or ignore or to simply carry on regardless of the scuffles and clashes.
Despite the tone of this novel and my own attempts to understand everyone’s motivations, I found myself caring about these characters and their concerns – whether or not they were able to express them directly.
I also learned more from this novel than I thought I had, and I enjoyed it enough that I look forward to reading more of Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the future.
One of the first things I found interesting was the great care the author took in keeping the story relatively dispassionate throughout. In doing so, she reflected the attitudes of the people she wrote about, and the times they lived in.
It is Ireland, “between the wars”; a time when England had sent out the “Black and Tans” with the expressed purpose of keeping law and order in a country experiencing many internal battles. History tells us this was a mistake, although who really knows. Things did not end well, but it is impossible to say if they would have ended better had Ireland been allowed to sort through their civil wars on their own.
This story is about relationships: relatives, relatives of relatives, friends and their relatives. It is also about a family whose roots are deeply Irish, yet they are part of the aristocracy and possibly the roots of their roots were English.
It was fascinating to listen in on their conversations: talking at, past, or through each other. Sometimes, two people would hold an entire conversation where each is expressing responses to their individual thoughts rather than to the words of other person. And there were many of these conversations. The hosts, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, Lois (Sir Richard’s niece), and Lawrence (Lady Naylor’s nephew) had house guests through the summer and into September.
There were parties: garden parties, tennis parties, and even dances for the young people where young ladies were hand-picked and invited as dance partners for the young subalterns in their own small town of huts and barracks.
Everyone, including the militia, seemed to ignore the skirmishes that broke out from time to time. For some, it was beneath their notice; for others it was a condition they preferred to forget or ignore or to simply carry on regardless of the scuffles and clashes.
Despite the tone of this novel and my own attempts to understand everyone’s motivations, I found myself caring about these characters and their concerns – whether or not they were able to express them directly.
I also learned more from this novel than I thought I had, and I enjoyed it enough that I look forward to reading more of Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the future.
September 22, 2018
It says on the front cover of this copy NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE. Have you ever seen them say NOW A MINOR MOTION PICTURE? No of course not. Or even NOW A MOTION PICTURE. Or NOW A SO-SO ART HOUSE MOVIE. Or NOW A VERY MILDLY ENTERTAINING MINISERIES.
Well, there were two reasons why this was a mistake to pick up. One was I realised I had this year read a great novel called Troubles by JG Farrell all about the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy during the Irish War of Independence after World War One with the IRA taking pot shots and everything decaying. The Last September is about the precise same thing – oops! I didn’t know! But that was minor – the main thing was the STYLE of Elizabeth Bowen. She piles it on with a trowel, nay, an earthmover. It was cloying, like wearing a suit of armour filled with a month’s worth of leftover chicken tikka masala.
I have two quotes for you which will demonstrate the borderline revoltingness of this style.
They have dinner in the posh but decaying mansion:
Spaced out accurately round the enormous table – whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer – each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal – the six, in spite of an emphasis in speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding into the rush of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude – an outmoded modishness, a quirk or a flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread over the cleft of a bosom – cancelled time, negative personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.
Second – a description of the heroine:
When she turned away, the light from behind ran a finger round the curve of her jaw. When she turned his way, light took the uncertain dinted cheek-line where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of the bone. … in repose her lips met doubtfully, in a never determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the bridge the finished off softly and bluntly, as by an upward flick of the sculptor’s thumb.
I didn’t like any of this – the highlighted phrases seem especially ridiculous – and I couldn’t face wading through a thousand more examples. I would be interested to see if anyone would like to defend this as "good writing". I myself would prosecute it for timewasting and swanking in public without a license.
So, whatever you heard about me and Elizabeth Bowen, I can now tell you, it’s all off between us. There never was an us.
Well, there were two reasons why this was a mistake to pick up. One was I realised I had this year read a great novel called Troubles by JG Farrell all about the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy during the Irish War of Independence after World War One with the IRA taking pot shots and everything decaying. The Last September is about the precise same thing – oops! I didn’t know! But that was minor – the main thing was the STYLE of Elizabeth Bowen. She piles it on with a trowel, nay, an earthmover. It was cloying, like wearing a suit of armour filled with a month’s worth of leftover chicken tikka masala.
I have two quotes for you which will demonstrate the borderline revoltingness of this style.
They have dinner in the posh but decaying mansion:
Spaced out accurately round the enormous table – whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer – each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal – the six, in spite of an emphasis in speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding into the rush of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude – an outmoded modishness, a quirk or a flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread over the cleft of a bosom – cancelled time, negative personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.
Second – a description of the heroine:
When she turned away, the light from behind ran a finger round the curve of her jaw. When she turned his way, light took the uncertain dinted cheek-line where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of the bone. … in repose her lips met doubtfully, in a never determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the bridge the finished off softly and bluntly, as by an upward flick of the sculptor’s thumb.
I didn’t like any of this – the highlighted phrases seem especially ridiculous – and I couldn’t face wading through a thousand more examples. I would be interested to see if anyone would like to defend this as "good writing". I myself would prosecute it for timewasting and swanking in public without a license.
So, whatever you heard about me and Elizabeth Bowen, I can now tell you, it’s all off between us. There never was an us.
June 5, 2018
Very much like To the North, this is Elizabeth Bowen finding her feet as a novelist. Once again the narrative perspective is overly fidgety, flitting from head to head. I found only three characters warranted the attention given to them - Lois, Hugo and Lady Naylor. The other characters were largely present to provide social comedy which is the task set the dialogue. Their inner lives weren't very interesting. Even the social comedy is largely derivative (Forster's mischievous sympathy towards dreadful women looms large). I've got a hunch Bowen only really discovered how to successfully structure a novel after she had fully assimilated the influence of Henry James, a master architect. But on every page Bowen surprises by just how brilliantly she can write when inspired. It's often in the descriptive lyrical passages that Bowen announces her genius, when she dramatizes the outside world as a register of her characters' inner lives. The natural world in Bowen is often exemplary. It foreshadows, clarifies and criticises. It is often unforgiving where Bowen is ostensibly generous; prophetic where she is ostensibly prosaic; caustic where she is ostensibly humorous. It's often where all the defensive sophistications of Bowen's characters are exposed as little more than fancy dress.
At the final count, Elizabeth Bowen can write better than 99% of living novelists, which is always a reason for reading even her minor early works.
NB: I watched twenty minutes of the film adaptation last night. It was appalling! I've never seen so many good actors in such a fatuous film. Two salient characteristics of the book are that most of the drama takes place off-stage and all the relationships are marriages of convenience, products of disappointment and lack of courage. The film changes all this; it also changes the central character Lois from a sophisticated, knotted and cerebral young woman into a flighty flirtatious cliché in a white dress dancing among trees. John Banville wrote the screenplay and confirmed all my misgivings about him as a writer. Quite simply Bowen wrote much better dialogue.
At the final count, Elizabeth Bowen can write better than 99% of living novelists, which is always a reason for reading even her minor early works.
NB: I watched twenty minutes of the film adaptation last night. It was appalling! I've never seen so many good actors in such a fatuous film. Two salient characteristics of the book are that most of the drama takes place off-stage and all the relationships are marriages of convenience, products of disappointment and lack of courage. The film changes all this; it also changes the central character Lois from a sophisticated, knotted and cerebral young woman into a flighty flirtatious cliché in a white dress dancing among trees. John Banville wrote the screenplay and confirmed all my misgivings about him as a writer. Quite simply Bowen wrote much better dialogue.
November 8, 2014
So, I’m not a huge fan of Important Subject books. Books that modestly proclaim on their jackets that they are Essential Reading about a Crucial Time in history that reveal Human Truths about our Darkest Hours, or authors who set soap operas in times of great stress that come with their own built in pile of cultural garbage so as to do the emotional work that their depiction of a relationship is not capable of doing. It’s almost worse when authors like this attempt to deepen their surface drama- that’s when we end up with Flowery Metaphors really should have been left back in the thesaurus they came from.
Elizabeth Bowen’s book could have been one of these. It could have been a story of a young girl who falls in love with a young boy in a star-crossed situation, as Divided Loyalties draw single tears down their cheeks. It could have also been the story of Bright Young Things and their oblivious parents spinning slowly out of control, pushing aside chintz and gauze to look with confusion on the riots in the streets, seemingly vaguely Sad before turning back to their dinner party. And it was both these things. And… really, not either of them.
Set in years of the Irish rebellion just after WWI, Bowen’s tale shows us a picture of an English ruling class living an increasingly tenuous existence as their lives slowly burn down, starting over the horizon where you can just barely make out a change in the air, then creeping into the forest with flickers of unsettling light at night (“Did you see that, Mama?” “I am sure it must be your imagination, my love.”), then in oversized shadows at the gate, until finally a highly Inappropriate and Dirty man interrupts their dinner. The book is, objectively, about this. A society ignoring reality as long as it is conceivably possible, its Hear No Evil, See No Evil philosophy kept intact by such firm rules and codes of conduct that those who contravene them by a hairsbreadth are immediately identified as The Enemy. The only enemy that can be identified in a war where they really can’t choose sides and remain themselves. There were parts of this story that were well done. I liked the depiction of the aunt and her rigid attempts to control everything she could while she could ( “Is he supposed to love her?” “My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he officially doesn’t.”), the vague presence of the man of the house who couldn’t control anything at all, and the conversation amongst the wives of the soldiers and Irish ladies who have to keep reminding themselves who is English and who is Irish.
But I did feel like Bowen had had a bit of an Idea about this and was so excited to tell me about it, she couldn’t stop telling me, every few pages throughout most of the book. I wish she had trusted herself that she showed me the situation well enough and in so many ways that she didn’t need to tell me about it over and over again as well. Not until the end. Then, yes, please show me a man’s heavy boots walking on a red carpet, past broken vases, scattered roses and fallen chairs and crushing his cigar into the face of a fallen ancestor until it melts under gathering embers. It is a delicate thing to convey, the last moments of twilight, and I know you want to tell everyone about it when you see it. But you can’t shout, you just can’t. I know it is an early work, however, and I do make allowances for that. I think she is making a good point, and she does make me feel like the sun is going down and I can’t look away, so ultimately, she wins.
Anyway, that part of the book isn’t really the reason to read this though. I’ve a shelf full of decaying empires and dying eyes, and many of them better than this in a lot of ways. Bowen’s writing truly shines on another storyline, that is, the development of the main character, Lucy. For once, the story of the young girl finding herself and falling in love IS the reason to read this, and not something to roll one’s eyes at while drinking in the atmosphere. Bowen’s rendering of Lois in her transitional stage is gorgeous and evocative, and set apart by a special talent. She has the ability to teleport me, in a blink, almost involuntarily, into standing in Lois’ shoes and looking out through her eyes. There are many books that may tell you things that you remember feeling or thinking as a teenager, but how many of them make you remember what it was like to physically be inside the skin of a teenager?
From the first page, this book made me twitch and twist my body in remembered sympathy with Lois. She stands out on the drive in front of her house, on display: “she stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her.. she wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.” I could feel Lois’ fingers digging into the bones of her elbows and leaving marks because she can’t think of anything else to do to contain her embarrassment at looking ‘like other young girls’ but to literally hold it underneath her skin. I was closing my eyes and feeling the sun and thought how long could I actually do that, I’d have to look to the dogs… and then I opened them and Lois found refuge in a big, comforting dog, which meant her hands could do something else, something that looked more natural, while still allowing her to hide her embarrassment.
With Lois, Bowen has no trouble moderating her tone and choosing perfect, exquisite words to bring awkward, yearning, bumbling, wanting, unsure Lois to life. Visitors to her seemingly humdrum life, however boring induce an excitement that make her unable to read, and yet she “yawns with reaction” when they appear. And of course she would be the one to observe that her fingernails were “the only part of one’s person.. of which it was possible to be conscious socially.” Then later, it makes so much sense that as she is bursting with excitement at having encountered a possible rebel in the gardens, she rushes home, but finds as she arrives that “her adventure began to diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then confidence disappeared, in a waver of shadow, among the furniture. Conceivably, she had just surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile. But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen…” Of course you can’t tell an adult, they wouldn’t understand, and its physically painful to think how they might ruin something under their gaze that makes everything normal, safe, silly or otherwise. Real experiences must be treasured and thought over a thousand times but never said out loud. Going upstairs without saying goodnight to do just that is the ultimate rebellion.
I adore Lois. I adore that in her faltering, halting relationship with Gerald, she progresses and does not in a way that is consistent with the awkwardness of a girl who uses her fingernails as a social escape and does not know where her life is going. All obstacles don’t melt away because of a strong man who likes her- nor is he simply just a faraway man, an object of a Prince Charming necessary to complete a picture. He tries to start this way, offering Lois an uncomplicated, unquestioned fairy tale love- but faced with a real girl in return, he has to confront his own feelings to face her. He kisses Lois and it is everything to her, and since she is transformed, why is not he transformed? Why isn’t everything transformed? At a party, still trying to see her kiss everywhere, “She looked for his mouth- which had kissed her- but found it no different from the mouths of other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the dark, was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him.” And ultimately, Bowen creates such a painful climax as she guides Lois painfully, slowly, gorgeously through to becoming herself and finding a world in which she feels comfortable, taking a step forward to choosing a person to be… and shows that world ripped away from Lois by random, awful chance. How horrible is that? Finally comfortable enough to join a world you’ve been trained for since birth, and it was all lies. Lies adults selfishly conspired in, guiding you away from what you knew was true, until you believed them, and thought the fires in the distance mere illusions. It happens to everyone when they are finally allowed to walk through the Real World, alone, in Lois’ case, her illusions are literally shot down in the night, and then burnt down in front of her, rather than the slow, gracious realization that most people are permitted. Poor Lois. This is a book where I would welcome a sequel. How do you deal with such a betrayal? Does she join the Lost Generation in Paris and lament it in wine and dissipation? Does she try to lock it away and bury herself a replica of what she lost? Does she dare to question herself and feel in the same way again? Or does she go home and try to puzzle out what happened to her for the rest of her life? What happens?
Bowen’s choice to make her story every day and ordinary and wrapped up with tea visits, carpets and hairbrushes makes this grounded enough to feel real rather than a soap opera. Her careful rendering of Lois’s vacillating identity offers us a unique window into a fragile, vanishing moment that can’t last. Her political message may have thrown me out of the narrative a few times, but her depiction of Lucy rushing down the stairs and breathlessly trying on a dashing older woman’s fur coat brought me back in. Her shouting may have made me wince, but her gorgeous whispering made me lean forward again. It almost seems she is vacillating herself, like Lois, as a writer- between excited youth and maturity. Perhaps that is why she understood Lois so well. I don’t know. But I was delighted to spend time with both of them.
Elizabeth Bowen’s book could have been one of these. It could have been a story of a young girl who falls in love with a young boy in a star-crossed situation, as Divided Loyalties draw single tears down their cheeks. It could have also been the story of Bright Young Things and their oblivious parents spinning slowly out of control, pushing aside chintz and gauze to look with confusion on the riots in the streets, seemingly vaguely Sad before turning back to their dinner party. And it was both these things. And… really, not either of them.
Set in years of the Irish rebellion just after WWI, Bowen’s tale shows us a picture of an English ruling class living an increasingly tenuous existence as their lives slowly burn down, starting over the horizon where you can just barely make out a change in the air, then creeping into the forest with flickers of unsettling light at night (“Did you see that, Mama?” “I am sure it must be your imagination, my love.”), then in oversized shadows at the gate, until finally a highly Inappropriate and Dirty man interrupts their dinner. The book is, objectively, about this. A society ignoring reality as long as it is conceivably possible, its Hear No Evil, See No Evil philosophy kept intact by such firm rules and codes of conduct that those who contravene them by a hairsbreadth are immediately identified as The Enemy. The only enemy that can be identified in a war where they really can’t choose sides and remain themselves. There were parts of this story that were well done. I liked the depiction of the aunt and her rigid attempts to control everything she could while she could ( “Is he supposed to love her?” “My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he officially doesn’t.”), the vague presence of the man of the house who couldn’t control anything at all, and the conversation amongst the wives of the soldiers and Irish ladies who have to keep reminding themselves who is English and who is Irish.
But I did feel like Bowen had had a bit of an Idea about this and was so excited to tell me about it, she couldn’t stop telling me, every few pages throughout most of the book. I wish she had trusted herself that she showed me the situation well enough and in so many ways that she didn’t need to tell me about it over and over again as well. Not until the end. Then, yes, please show me a man’s heavy boots walking on a red carpet, past broken vases, scattered roses and fallen chairs and crushing his cigar into the face of a fallen ancestor until it melts under gathering embers. It is a delicate thing to convey, the last moments of twilight, and I know you want to tell everyone about it when you see it. But you can’t shout, you just can’t. I know it is an early work, however, and I do make allowances for that. I think she is making a good point, and she does make me feel like the sun is going down and I can’t look away, so ultimately, she wins.
Anyway, that part of the book isn’t really the reason to read this though. I’ve a shelf full of decaying empires and dying eyes, and many of them better than this in a lot of ways. Bowen’s writing truly shines on another storyline, that is, the development of the main character, Lucy. For once, the story of the young girl finding herself and falling in love IS the reason to read this, and not something to roll one’s eyes at while drinking in the atmosphere. Bowen’s rendering of Lois in her transitional stage is gorgeous and evocative, and set apart by a special talent. She has the ability to teleport me, in a blink, almost involuntarily, into standing in Lois’ shoes and looking out through her eyes. There are many books that may tell you things that you remember feeling or thinking as a teenager, but how many of them make you remember what it was like to physically be inside the skin of a teenager?
From the first page, this book made me twitch and twist my body in remembered sympathy with Lois. She stands out on the drive in front of her house, on display: “she stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her.. she wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.” I could feel Lois’ fingers digging into the bones of her elbows and leaving marks because she can’t think of anything else to do to contain her embarrassment at looking ‘like other young girls’ but to literally hold it underneath her skin. I was closing my eyes and feeling the sun and thought how long could I actually do that, I’d have to look to the dogs… and then I opened them and Lois found refuge in a big, comforting dog, which meant her hands could do something else, something that looked more natural, while still allowing her to hide her embarrassment.
With Lois, Bowen has no trouble moderating her tone and choosing perfect, exquisite words to bring awkward, yearning, bumbling, wanting, unsure Lois to life. Visitors to her seemingly humdrum life, however boring induce an excitement that make her unable to read, and yet she “yawns with reaction” when they appear. And of course she would be the one to observe that her fingernails were “the only part of one’s person.. of which it was possible to be conscious socially.” Then later, it makes so much sense that as she is bursting with excitement at having encountered a possible rebel in the gardens, she rushes home, but finds as she arrives that “her adventure began to diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then confidence disappeared, in a waver of shadow, among the furniture. Conceivably, she had just surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile. But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen…” Of course you can’t tell an adult, they wouldn’t understand, and its physically painful to think how they might ruin something under their gaze that makes everything normal, safe, silly or otherwise. Real experiences must be treasured and thought over a thousand times but never said out loud. Going upstairs without saying goodnight to do just that is the ultimate rebellion.
I adore Lois. I adore that in her faltering, halting relationship with Gerald, she progresses and does not in a way that is consistent with the awkwardness of a girl who uses her fingernails as a social escape and does not know where her life is going. All obstacles don’t melt away because of a strong man who likes her- nor is he simply just a faraway man, an object of a Prince Charming necessary to complete a picture. He tries to start this way, offering Lois an uncomplicated, unquestioned fairy tale love- but faced with a real girl in return, he has to confront his own feelings to face her. He kisses Lois and it is everything to her, and since she is transformed, why is not he transformed? Why isn’t everything transformed? At a party, still trying to see her kiss everywhere, “She looked for his mouth- which had kissed her- but found it no different from the mouths of other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the dark, was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him.” And ultimately, Bowen creates such a painful climax as she guides Lois painfully, slowly, gorgeously through to becoming herself and finding a world in which she feels comfortable, taking a step forward to choosing a person to be… and shows that world ripped away from Lois by random, awful chance. How horrible is that? Finally comfortable enough to join a world you’ve been trained for since birth, and it was all lies. Lies adults selfishly conspired in, guiding you away from what you knew was true, until you believed them, and thought the fires in the distance mere illusions. It happens to everyone when they are finally allowed to walk through the Real World, alone, in Lois’ case, her illusions are literally shot down in the night, and then burnt down in front of her, rather than the slow, gracious realization that most people are permitted. Poor Lois. This is a book where I would welcome a sequel. How do you deal with such a betrayal? Does she join the Lost Generation in Paris and lament it in wine and dissipation? Does she try to lock it away and bury herself a replica of what she lost? Does she dare to question herself and feel in the same way again? Or does she go home and try to puzzle out what happened to her for the rest of her life? What happens?
Bowen’s choice to make her story every day and ordinary and wrapped up with tea visits, carpets and hairbrushes makes this grounded enough to feel real rather than a soap opera. Her careful rendering of Lois’s vacillating identity offers us a unique window into a fragile, vanishing moment that can’t last. Her political message may have thrown me out of the narrative a few times, but her depiction of Lucy rushing down the stairs and breathlessly trying on a dashing older woman’s fur coat brought me back in. Her shouting may have made me wince, but her gorgeous whispering made me lean forward again. It almost seems she is vacillating herself, like Lois, as a writer- between excited youth and maturity. Perhaps that is why she understood Lois so well. I don’t know. But I was delighted to spend time with both of them.
June 21, 2023
Set during the Irish bid for independence in 1920, The Last September carries from its first page a feeling of unrest and tension that is belied by the characters as we are introduced to them. There is so much going on beneath the surface in both the country and these people.
What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually–our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.
At the Irish estate, Danielstown, Sir Richard Naylor’s niece, Lois, lives a privileged and rather useless life, peppered with the attentions of the English soldiers who are garrisoned in her district, and she struggles with the idea of who or what she is meant to be. We see Lois, her life and her choices, as she encounters visitors to her home, the Montmorency's, old friends of her aunt and uncle; Marda Norton, an enigmatic woman who gives her a glimpse of life outside Ireland; her cousin, Lawrence, another, slightly older, ward of the Naylor’s; and Gerald, the subaltern who has fallen in love with her.
For me, the most interesting character of all is Marda. Marda Norton is the sophisticate that Lois wants to be; Lois is the innocent that Marda has lost. They are a study in contrast and similarity. Both of them make one feel a sense of life as a bit of a crap shoot, sometimes riddled with misunderstanding, cloudy with uncertainty, and absolutely ungovernable. But Marda has a grasp of the reality that the others seem to lack. Her eyes are open to the world; she sees.
I never thought of there being stepping stones. I only wanted to cross because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?
This is, in a way, a story of sides. The English vs. the Irish, the rich vs. the poor, the landed and settled vs. those at loose ends–the lines often drawn very arbitrarily and viewed too superficially. It is also a story of control--who controls the country, who controls our lives, and can we ever control them ourselves.
This is my third Bowen novel, and I have a great respect for her ability to expose the heart and soul of her subjects. She reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor in many ways…her stories are quite and oddly uneventful, but packed with meaning, and in the end, not simple at all.
What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually–our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.
At the Irish estate, Danielstown, Sir Richard Naylor’s niece, Lois, lives a privileged and rather useless life, peppered with the attentions of the English soldiers who are garrisoned in her district, and she struggles with the idea of who or what she is meant to be. We see Lois, her life and her choices, as she encounters visitors to her home, the Montmorency's, old friends of her aunt and uncle; Marda Norton, an enigmatic woman who gives her a glimpse of life outside Ireland; her cousin, Lawrence, another, slightly older, ward of the Naylor’s; and Gerald, the subaltern who has fallen in love with her.
For me, the most interesting character of all is Marda. Marda Norton is the sophisticate that Lois wants to be; Lois is the innocent that Marda has lost. They are a study in contrast and similarity. Both of them make one feel a sense of life as a bit of a crap shoot, sometimes riddled with misunderstanding, cloudy with uncertainty, and absolutely ungovernable. But Marda has a grasp of the reality that the others seem to lack. Her eyes are open to the world; she sees.
I never thought of there being stepping stones. I only wanted to cross because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?
This is, in a way, a story of sides. The English vs. the Irish, the rich vs. the poor, the landed and settled vs. those at loose ends–the lines often drawn very arbitrarily and viewed too superficially. It is also a story of control--who controls the country, who controls our lives, and can we ever control them ourselves.
This is my third Bowen novel, and I have a great respect for her ability to expose the heart and soul of her subjects. She reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor in many ways…her stories are quite and oddly uneventful, but packed with meaning, and in the end, not simple at all.
April 12, 2020
The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the house - embracing the lawns, banks and terraces in mild ascent - had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered.
For those of us who love close reading, the entire arc of this novel is encapsulated, in miniature, in this paragraph from p.22. The house which is one of the main characters in the book - a house that has belonged for generations to an Anglo-Irish Protestant family of landowners - is a kind of oasis, once protected by the 'arm' of trees, but those very trees themselves have turned sinister and are now the habitat of Sinn Feiners walking through these grounds and burying guns at will. What was once a kind of sanctuary is now increasingly looking like an island in an increasingly hostile country. Bowen's lexicon is redolent of this sense of foreboding: 'darkened', 'deepening', 'splintered', 'pierced', 'faltering', 'dusk'. The 'Troubles' that are agitating Ireland in 1920 are 'pressing' in on this enclave of Anglo privilege, ironically 'like an invasion', and while they might only be creeping and smouldering at this time, they will, of course, become a 'cataract'.
This example of Bowen's masterly writing explains, I think, why she can be seen as a divisive writer: some people dislike what is seen as vagueness, padding, an oblique or even obscure suggestiveness in the text, others of us love her for precisely these qualities. It's marvellous to me that she appears to be such a fully-formed author in this, only her second novel, when she herself is not yet thirty.
While the house is one character, the book is also filled with human people deftly sketched in even when they're merely marginal. Bowen is also attentive to the complications of Irish history, not least the ambivalences and liminal position of the Anglo- Irish: they may express their privilege through a kind of paternalistic care for the 'Irish-Irish' but there's no doubting their status from the 'big house' (significantly and repeatedly named a 'demesne' with all its feudal connotations) to the Oxford/art-school-in-Paris education of their scions. At the same time, though, they're rather deliciously snobbish about the English, primarily represented by the local British Army garrison. The young army officers (officers, natch!) are perfectly fine to escort Anglo-Irish girls to tennis parties and dances, but heaven forbid they should actually try to marry into this class above them! There's an almost Lady Catherine de Burgh scene as Lady Naylor sees off one such engagement.
Against this politicised background, Bowen plays out themes that recur across her novels: asymmetrical and unrequited love, disillusion and disappointment, and a young woman coming to grips with the adult world to which she doesn't quite, yet, belong. An elegiac, almost tragic vision haunts this book and lingers beneath the surface of sunny tea parties and picnics.
December 11, 2022
This book
palpably
draws the life of the Anglo-Irish living in County Cork in 1920, which is to say during the Irish War of Independence. From 1919 to 1921 the Irish Republican Army were here fighting against British forces. The Anglo-Irish were uncertain of where their allegiance stood. Who is friend and who is foe? Could one individual in fact be both? Friends and foes were to be found on both sides. The social mores of the landed gentry and of the upper-middle class are picturesquely drawn. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The reader is immersed in another time and place.
Rather than a depiction of political events, the story focuses instead on the atmosphere, the tenseness in the air. Skirmishes break the peace, shots reverberate, fires are lit--while parties go on. This is all the more terrible because friends and well known acquaintances are those injured. A love attraction arises. Will it be allowed to run its natural course?
The book is worth reading just for its prose. Lines are beautiful. Lines are perceptive. Lines are clever. Lines make you smile and chuckle. I enjoyed sucking on the sentences. As I read, I didn’t really care where the plot would take me. I was so thoroughly enjoying the passage through the book, that I didn’t give a hoot where or how it would end. I am not saying I dislike the ending. It’s subdued; I think it is perfect. History is in this book the backdrop of people’s busy lives.
I am not sure the book will appeal to everyone. It’s introspective. It is for those who enjoy thinking about people’s behavior. It is for those who enjoy descriptive writing. It is for those who enjoy sentences such as these:
“She wished he was the kind of man who went out and took apart a car.” `
Do you see the humor?
Here’s another amusing line. A young boy, Hercules, speaks of his teacher: “I am using up the end of my sister’s governess.”
“Mrs. R. laughed all the time. You might have said with despair.”
“He supposed he could not help but be a philosopher.”
“Evening drenched the trees……. Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone.”
“Shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs.”
“It was splendid of you to forget I was English.”
The audiobook is very well read by Lauren Coe. Her pacing is perfect. With her reading the lines, even disconnected dialogues make sense. She doesn’t dramatize. She lets the marvelous prose speak for itself. Four stars for the narration.
Great writing and an interesting topic done in an unusual way.
**************************
*The Death of the Heart 4 star
*The Last September 4 stars
*The House in Paris 3 stars
*The Demon Lover 2 stars
*The Heat of the Day TBR
*A World of Love TBR
*The Little Girls TBR
Rather than a depiction of political events, the story focuses instead on the atmosphere, the tenseness in the air. Skirmishes break the peace, shots reverberate, fires are lit--while parties go on. This is all the more terrible because friends and well known acquaintances are those injured. A love attraction arises. Will it be allowed to run its natural course?
The book is worth reading just for its prose. Lines are beautiful. Lines are perceptive. Lines are clever. Lines make you smile and chuckle. I enjoyed sucking on the sentences. As I read, I didn’t really care where the plot would take me. I was so thoroughly enjoying the passage through the book, that I didn’t give a hoot where or how it would end. I am not saying I dislike the ending. It’s subdued; I think it is perfect. History is in this book the backdrop of people’s busy lives.
I am not sure the book will appeal to everyone. It’s introspective. It is for those who enjoy thinking about people’s behavior. It is for those who enjoy descriptive writing. It is for those who enjoy sentences such as these:
“She wished he was the kind of man who went out and took apart a car.” `
Do you see the humor?
Here’s another amusing line. A young boy, Hercules, speaks of his teacher: “I am using up the end of my sister’s governess.”
“Mrs. R. laughed all the time. You might have said with despair.”
“He supposed he could not help but be a philosopher.”
“Evening drenched the trees……. Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone.”
“Shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs.”
“It was splendid of you to forget I was English.”
The audiobook is very well read by Lauren Coe. Her pacing is perfect. With her reading the lines, even disconnected dialogues make sense. She doesn’t dramatize. She lets the marvelous prose speak for itself. Four stars for the narration.
Great writing and an interesting topic done in an unusual way.
**************************
*The Death of the Heart 4 star
*The Last September 4 stars
*The House in Paris 3 stars
*The Demon Lover 2 stars
*The Heat of the Day TBR
*A World of Love TBR
*The Little Girls TBR
July 2, 2022
There is a particular joy in ‘discovering’ a classic novelist with whom for some unaccountable reason you have never connected before. I picked up my first Elizabeth Bowen at the suggestion of a friend who recommended her especially as a stylist. He was right. Her prose is exquisite: beautifully considered and highly artful, without being mannered. I enjoyed her writing both at sentence level and also across paragraphs, where it has a lovely, fluid drift.
At times, Bowen’s style reminded me of Henry James (in a good way), and I was interested to read that she recognised this tendency, especially in her later novels. Asked about his influence on her towards the end of her career, in 1959, she replied, ‘you can’t say it’s like catching the measles, because it’s a splendid style, but it’s a dangerous style’. She was particularly preoccupied about ‘catching’ James’ late style and had her editors on alert to diagnose any tell-tale symptoms.
The Last September is one of her earlier novels, written in 1929 and revisiting recent Irish history, the period of the Troubles. The setting of the novel is a mansion in County Cork, Danielstown (modelled on Bowen’s own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court), and The Last September opens in full country house mode, complete with tennis parties and girls in gauzy white frocks. Before long, though, references to partisan violence begin to unsettle the narrative. A local farmer has a son fighting with the Irish nationalists. Several of the tennis partners are British soldiers. The Anglo-Irish aristocratic family at the heart of the narrative is gradually finding itself ‘otherised’ by former neighbours, foreign occupiers within the land of their birth.
Bowen considered The Last September the ‘nearest to [her] heart’ of her novels, partly because of its high autobiographical content, as an evocation of her youth (the protagonist is a nineteen-year-old girl, Lois Farquar, and Bowen wrote it at the age of around thirty). There are plenty of other reasons why she might have loved it, though. It’s an extraordinarily accomplished novel, even setting aside its stylistic distinction; all the elements are in balance, and the interweaving of personal and political history is expertly done. There’s a lot of astute psychological observation, as well, especially in the second of the three sections (‘The Visit of Miss Norton’), when the precarious human geometries of Danielstown are thrown out of kilter by the arrival of the vivid, restless Marda Norton, with whom just about everyone falls in love. I suspect, though I’m late to the party, that Bowen will now become part of my pantheon; I went on immediately from The Last September to read a second novel by her, To the North (1932).
At times, Bowen’s style reminded me of Henry James (in a good way), and I was interested to read that she recognised this tendency, especially in her later novels. Asked about his influence on her towards the end of her career, in 1959, she replied, ‘you can’t say it’s like catching the measles, because it’s a splendid style, but it’s a dangerous style’. She was particularly preoccupied about ‘catching’ James’ late style and had her editors on alert to diagnose any tell-tale symptoms.
The Last September is one of her earlier novels, written in 1929 and revisiting recent Irish history, the period of the Troubles. The setting of the novel is a mansion in County Cork, Danielstown (modelled on Bowen’s own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court), and The Last September opens in full country house mode, complete with tennis parties and girls in gauzy white frocks. Before long, though, references to partisan violence begin to unsettle the narrative. A local farmer has a son fighting with the Irish nationalists. Several of the tennis partners are British soldiers. The Anglo-Irish aristocratic family at the heart of the narrative is gradually finding itself ‘otherised’ by former neighbours, foreign occupiers within the land of their birth.
Bowen considered The Last September the ‘nearest to [her] heart’ of her novels, partly because of its high autobiographical content, as an evocation of her youth (the protagonist is a nineteen-year-old girl, Lois Farquar, and Bowen wrote it at the age of around thirty). There are plenty of other reasons why she might have loved it, though. It’s an extraordinarily accomplished novel, even setting aside its stylistic distinction; all the elements are in balance, and the interweaving of personal and political history is expertly done. There’s a lot of astute psychological observation, as well, especially in the second of the three sections (‘The Visit of Miss Norton’), when the precarious human geometries of Danielstown are thrown out of kilter by the arrival of the vivid, restless Marda Norton, with whom just about everyone falls in love. I suspect, though I’m late to the party, that Bowen will now become part of my pantheon; I went on immediately from The Last September to read a second novel by her, To the North (1932).
July 5, 2021
I’m not sure I can read anything more by this author. This is my third attempt – The House in Paris (3 stars) and The Hotel (2 stars) were the previous works I have read by her.
Elizabeth Bowen has her legion of admirers. Stuck in the middle of the book was a review article I pulled from the London Review of Books by Tessa Hadley (February 20, 2020 issue) on Elizabeth Bowen and her short stories (Collected Stories,). Her short stories have all been gathered together and published by Everyman, a subsidiary of Knopf…they only re-issue the crème de la crème. So, Elizabeth Bowen is well-respected. But I, for the most part, do not like her style of writing. 🙁
Perhaps part of my problem with this book is my lack of knowledge about Ireland and its history in the early 20th century. Because that’s the time period and setting in which this novel occurs – 1920 in Ireland. The reader is aware there are British soldiers in some towns in Ireland. They take over houses, so they have living quarters. Of course I know there are some in Ireland who are hostile to the British. The central characters in the novel are Sir Richard Naylor and his wife Myra and their niece Lois, who they have been raising since Lois’ mother died. They have visitors who are staying with them: Hugo Montmorency and his wife Francie. A British solider, Gerald, falls in love with Lois. Hugo used to love Lois’s mother but did not marry her and it’s confusing to me, but apparently he has the hots for Lois and he also has the hots for some young woman who is staying with the Naylors and is engaged to be married. He’s one weird weirdo.
Elizabeth Bowen’s writing style allows us to be privy to the thoughts of the different characters. They’re pretty much all stuff-shirt idiots so the reader is faced with over 300 pages of this crapola. 🙁
Anyhoo, it was very hard for me to follow which characters were “for” and “against” the British occupiers. There is one good paragraph which relays some useful information but it is too late in the book…in fact, it’s the last paragraph and even then I am left wondering .
I have one more book by her in my library (The Death of the Heart), but I will not be getting to it any time soon (but see Note below). 😐
Reviews
• (Well I learned they made the book into a movie – https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/th... ) https://theliteraryomnivore.wordpress...
• (I’m going to be odd-man out in my review...this was Bowen’s favorite book out of all the books she had written) https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
• https://afewofmyfavouritebooks.wordpr...
Note (this note added after having read the reviews):
Well now I get THIS thrown in my face (from the last review). Now I guess I have to read ‘The Death of the Heart”. 😞
• Elizabeth Bowen is definitely in my camp of favourite authors, after I read The Death of the Heart a few years ago, I had to order almost all of the rest of her novels because they’re hard to find in bookstores or libraries, and have had the chunk of them sitting on my shelf, all matching covers and mostly unread for some time, but after quickly finishing this one off, I will be coming back for more! To me, she’s sort of a Jane Austen-Henry James-Virginia Woolf combo of an author, closely analyzing the individual in the midst of larger groupings and developments. Some of my friends have complained she’s too detailed, after I’ve gotten them to try The Death of the Heart (generally considered her best and still my favourite out of the two), but it’s just the sort of character observation I enjoy and I think she certainly ought to be more widely known as an early 20th century female Irish author.”
Elizabeth Bowen has her legion of admirers. Stuck in the middle of the book was a review article I pulled from the London Review of Books by Tessa Hadley (February 20, 2020 issue) on Elizabeth Bowen and her short stories (Collected Stories,). Her short stories have all been gathered together and published by Everyman, a subsidiary of Knopf…they only re-issue the crème de la crème. So, Elizabeth Bowen is well-respected. But I, for the most part, do not like her style of writing. 🙁
Perhaps part of my problem with this book is my lack of knowledge about Ireland and its history in the early 20th century. Because that’s the time period and setting in which this novel occurs – 1920 in Ireland. The reader is aware there are British soldiers in some towns in Ireland. They take over houses, so they have living quarters. Of course I know there are some in Ireland who are hostile to the British. The central characters in the novel are Sir Richard Naylor and his wife Myra and their niece Lois, who they have been raising since Lois’ mother died. They have visitors who are staying with them: Hugo Montmorency and his wife Francie. A British solider, Gerald, falls in love with Lois. Hugo used to love Lois’s mother but did not marry her and it’s confusing to me, but apparently he has the hots for Lois and he also has the hots for some young woman who is staying with the Naylors and is engaged to be married. He’s one weird weirdo.
Elizabeth Bowen’s writing style allows us to be privy to the thoughts of the different characters. They’re pretty much all stuff-shirt idiots so the reader is faced with over 300 pages of this crapola. 🙁
Anyhoo, it was very hard for me to follow which characters were “for” and “against” the British occupiers. There is one good paragraph which relays some useful information but it is too late in the book…in fact, it’s the last paragraph and even then I am left wondering .
I have one more book by her in my library (The Death of the Heart), but I will not be getting to it any time soon (but see Note below). 😐
Reviews
• (Well I learned they made the book into a movie – https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/th... ) https://theliteraryomnivore.wordpress...
• (I’m going to be odd-man out in my review...this was Bowen’s favorite book out of all the books she had written) https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
• https://afewofmyfavouritebooks.wordpr...
Note (this note added after having read the reviews):
Well now I get THIS thrown in my face (from the last review). Now I guess I have to read ‘The Death of the Heart”. 😞
• Elizabeth Bowen is definitely in my camp of favourite authors, after I read The Death of the Heart a few years ago, I had to order almost all of the rest of her novels because they’re hard to find in bookstores or libraries, and have had the chunk of them sitting on my shelf, all matching covers and mostly unread for some time, but after quickly finishing this one off, I will be coming back for more! To me, she’s sort of a Jane Austen-Henry James-Virginia Woolf combo of an author, closely analyzing the individual in the midst of larger groupings and developments. Some of my friends have complained she’s too detailed, after I’ve gotten them to try The Death of the Heart (generally considered her best and still my favourite out of the two), but it’s just the sort of character observation I enjoy and I think she certainly ought to be more widely known as an early 20th century female Irish author.”
March 27, 2023
Романът ме провокира да се раз��овя в историята, защото не съм наясно с така наречените “Проблемни години” в Ирландия.
Книгата всъщност е много повече за Ирландия и отмиращата класа на англо-ирландската поземлена аристокрация, отколкото за съдбата на индивидуалните герои.
Определено съм впечатлена от романа и стила на Елизабет Боуен, въпреки че на моменти беше изпитание с недовършените изречения и цялата недоизказаност. Всъщност повечето събития на външно и вътрешно ниво са загатнати, до степен, че почти за всичко се налагаше само да гадая. Чета анализи на книгата, ще поровя още в историческите събития и атмосферата в Ирландия през 30-те години на миналия век преди да напиша истински отзив.
Книгата всъщност е много повече за Ирландия и отмиращата класа на англо-ирландската поземлена аристокрация, отколкото за съдбата на индивидуалните герои.
Определено съм впечатлена от романа и стила на Елизабет Боуен, въпреки че на моменти беше изпитание с недовършените изречения и цялата недоизказаност. Всъщност повечето събития на външно и вътрешно ниво са загатнати, до степен, че почти за всичко се налагаше само да гадая. Чета анализи на книгата, ще поровя още в историческите събития и атмосферата в Ирландия през 30-те години на миналия век преди да напиша истински отзив.
August 27, 2016
The characters of The Last September all seem to suffer from lethargy and incipient depression. They are unable to act, know, or even care. Only the wind has energy. Throughout the novel they are increasingly defined by relationship to objects, a move which is foreshadowed by the narrator's early listing of things amongst which she is at home.
September 24, 2020
Let's call it 3.5 stars?
When I first started this novel, it reminded me of Troubles by J.G. Farrell. Largely because of the time period and location, I think. But that story was seen through the eyes of an English war veteran and this one is largely told about a young Irish woman.
One of the biggest realizations for me was how little these folks had to occupy themselves, basically tennis, long walks, gossiping, gardening, and eating. No one goes off to a job and there are maids and stable boys to do most of the actual work of running a household. No wonder they have time to examine their relationships and doubt their choices so extravagantly.
Although set in Post-WWI, mores have only loosened a little and women are still very much expected to marry. Lois and Laurence are both living with their aunt and uncle, presumably because jobs are scarce and, as Laurence tells someone, he likes eating. The Irish endured a heavy death toll during the Great War, so I presume that is why both Lois and the neighbour girl Livvie spend a great deal of time with the young English soldiers who are stationed in Ireland to deal with the Republican movement.
It is this unsettled situation behind all of the characters which causes the seeming paralysis of the young people. How can you plan a life when your environment has so much potential for change? This household is torn between England and Ireland, not knowing which way to lean or whether to commit themselves. Lois knows which local men are in hiding, while she plays tennis with the English soldiers, cognitive dissonance that contributes to her lack of decisiveness.
It is an unhappy time to be Anglo-Irish, not trusted by either side. The ending, though sad, is hardly surprising.
Cross posted at my blog:
https://wanda-thenextfifty.blogspot.c...
When I first started this novel, it reminded me of Troubles by J.G. Farrell. Largely because of the time period and location, I think. But that story was seen through the eyes of an English war veteran and this one is largely told about a young Irish woman.
One of the biggest realizations for me was how little these folks had to occupy themselves, basically tennis, long walks, gossiping, gardening, and eating. No one goes off to a job and there are maids and stable boys to do most of the actual work of running a household. No wonder they have time to examine their relationships and doubt their choices so extravagantly.
Although set in Post-WWI, mores have only loosened a little and women are still very much expected to marry. Lois and Laurence are both living with their aunt and uncle, presumably because jobs are scarce and, as Laurence tells someone, he likes eating. The Irish endured a heavy death toll during the Great War, so I presume that is why both Lois and the neighbour girl Livvie spend a great deal of time with the young English soldiers who are stationed in Ireland to deal with the Republican movement.
It is this unsettled situation behind all of the characters which causes the seeming paralysis of the young people. How can you plan a life when your environment has so much potential for change? This household is torn between England and Ireland, not knowing which way to lean or whether to commit themselves. Lois knows which local men are in hiding, while she plays tennis with the English soldiers, cognitive dissonance that contributes to her lack of decisiveness.
It is an unhappy time to be Anglo-Irish, not trusted by either side. The ending, though sad, is hardly surprising.
Cross posted at my blog:
https://wanda-thenextfifty.blogspot.c...
November 26, 2023
Published in 1929, this novel is set firmly in Bowen's own experiences. She, herself, grew up in a 'Big House,' Anglo-Irish house. In the case of this novel, the house - almost a character in itself - is 'Danielstown' in Co. Cork, owned by Sir Richard and Lady Naylor. Also staying are Laurence, usually found with a book in his hand, and young Lois, an orphaned niece and central character of the novel.
Set in 1920, a house which has been an oasis of privilege, now has Sinn Fein gunmen on the periphery of the lawn; indeed, Lois, out walking in the garden, feels a man walking by her in the trees. A gunman? The inhabitants of the house are keen to downplay the danger and have a tendency to see the English as 'others,' in a way, so that they can cling to their own sense of belonging.
During the novel, there are visits. Many are neighbours, who are not only known to the Naylor's, but their ancestors are also familiar. They are part of a world that is in danger, but those who have lived for generations are loathe to admit the changes. When one visitor, Francie Montmorency ventures whether sitting on the steps in the evening may involve the risk of being shot at, she is genially decried as getting, 'very English.' Other visitors include young, English officers, who are ideal for tennis parties, but definitely seen as socially below the inhabitants of Danielstown,' and their neighbours.
Bowen covers some very important topics in this novel and many events are quite tragic. However, her writing is slow, personal and almost genteel at times. We see everything through the eyes of Lois, who is a young girl, just discovering the world and her place in it. I find this a really fascinating account of a time, and people, from an author who was very much an insider of that world and the characters she portrays.
Set in 1920, a house which has been an oasis of privilege, now has Sinn Fein gunmen on the periphery of the lawn; indeed, Lois, out walking in the garden, feels a man walking by her in the trees. A gunman? The inhabitants of the house are keen to downplay the danger and have a tendency to see the English as 'others,' in a way, so that they can cling to their own sense of belonging.
During the novel, there are visits. Many are neighbours, who are not only known to the Naylor's, but their ancestors are also familiar. They are part of a world that is in danger, but those who have lived for generations are loathe to admit the changes. When one visitor, Francie Montmorency ventures whether sitting on the steps in the evening may involve the risk of being shot at, she is genially decried as getting, 'very English.' Other visitors include young, English officers, who are ideal for tennis parties, but definitely seen as socially below the inhabitants of Danielstown,' and their neighbours.
Bowen covers some very important topics in this novel and many events are quite tragic. However, her writing is slow, personal and almost genteel at times. We see everything through the eyes of Lois, who is a young girl, just discovering the world and her place in it. I find this a really fascinating account of a time, and people, from an author who was very much an insider of that world and the characters she portrays.
February 9, 2021
I totally, totally LOVED this. Bowen is Superb. This is no - only her second novel- rubbish. At 29 years old - Bowen is at the height of her powers. This book works on many levels - the first time round - I found it so difficult. I had to read it slowly - each sentence I found myself mulling over again and again. I got out my dictionary - I looked up words - Irish words, old words, arcane, unused words. I even have a Pinterest board with pictures of a Tantalus - polished Sam Brownes - do you know what these are? I have a picture of the wagon and pony - it is shaped like a bucket with the driver sitting to one side - the other passenger would sit opposite. When I found this picture I suddenly understood how their knees would touch - and how the whole sky opened above them.
I could write a whole book about this book. I also watched the film - with Fiona Shaw - and wait for it - Maggie Smith. When I went back to the book and started again - I could see and hear Lady Naylor - every move, every syllable uttered was embodied in Maggie Smith. A young Keeley Hawes as Lois - managed to convey her innocence and also ambitions.
And then there is Irish history - the whole complicated Civil War followed immediately by the War of Independence - the complications of loyalty, but best of all is Bowen's dissection of the Anglo Irish - they are the Irish aristocracy and yet they are not like the British ruling powers - oh no in some way they are better - and some how loyal to the commoners who live in stone cottages and dig the peat bogs. Bowen incises all levels of society - with her real dialogues.
Probably I should re-read and give a better analysis and review.
I could write a whole book about this book. I also watched the film - with Fiona Shaw - and wait for it - Maggie Smith. When I went back to the book and started again - I could see and hear Lady Naylor - every move, every syllable uttered was embodied in Maggie Smith. A young Keeley Hawes as Lois - managed to convey her innocence and also ambitions.
And then there is Irish history - the whole complicated Civil War followed immediately by the War of Independence - the complications of loyalty, but best of all is Bowen's dissection of the Anglo Irish - they are the Irish aristocracy and yet they are not like the British ruling powers - oh no in some way they are better - and some how loyal to the commoners who live in stone cottages and dig the peat bogs. Bowen incises all levels of society - with her real dialogues.
Probably I should re-read and give a better analysis and review.
May 9, 2024
This novel is set during the Irish War of Independence but for the most part the characters the book focuses on try to ignore it. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor live at their stately home, Danielstown in Cork, also with their niece Lois and nephew Laurence and visiting friends. It’s all tea and tennis and parties with the occupying English forces. Lois is fancied by a young English officer Gerald, he wants to marry her but Lady Naylor doesn’t think he’s good enough for Lois. Meanwhile the English all look down their noses at the quaint Irish. And in the background is all the unsettling stuff about weapons and raids and other wartime activities, all the interesting stuff occurring in half finished sentences and off screen events. It’s a fascinating read, Bowen depicts the upper classes as quite static and sterile (there’s almost no children). They want everything to stay the same in their seemingly meaningless and pointless lives. It’s amusing (a bit social satire) and yet for me a bit frustrating as I’d have liked more details (like about the guy in the mill) and everything leading to the shocking (but not unexpected) events in the last chapters.
March 24, 2011
The Last September does not have power over me for what is believed to be lost. I do not mourn the loss of the English in Ireland living the good life of big houses.
What, Mariel? Sorry, my trains of thoughts are crashing. What?
Tell about the movie! Not yet-- okay, the movie is no good (nevermind that twenty year old me kinda liked it! Why are you admitting that? It isn't relevant to now!) because it evokes the feelings of rainy dinner party days and first horniness. Dinner parties like people getting together and trying to decide on some vague focal point in the distance that will get them all. Not people but guest lists. It didn't get them. There should have been some wrong feeling in there that wasn't just first horniness playing dress up at ways of life, first loves and breakthroughs... There were no breakthroughs! Just dinner party decisions.
Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September is not those things. It is the pain of someone in a far, far removed relationship. Maybe you don't know those people at all. You don't think it was such a good relationship. It's really for the best they aren't together anymore. "But I loved being with him even though I called him twenty times a day and he was never mine to begin with." Yeah, right. Maybe you can recall how you felt almost in love with other things. But this isn't love. It really isn't your love.
Bowen did have power over me in her mind reading capabilities. Like, I feel like I can read those minds. It beats any experience of listening in to vague shit. If you're going to get invested in someone else's relationship, at least you get the most feeling it will allow (I mean, only the involved parties really know how it feels. Taking sides? What's that?). You might as well be watching and listening for those heartbeats, even it cannot break your heart. Maybe I wanted to break theirs. Almost. If there had been more power. But I did want to listen. That's what I love about Bowen, even when I don't love her as much as I can (The Death of the Heart is my most relevant favorite).
What, Mariel? Sorry, my trains of thoughts are crashing. What?
Tell about the movie! Not yet-- okay, the movie is no good (nevermind that twenty year old me kinda liked it! Why are you admitting that? It isn't relevant to now!) because it evokes the feelings of rainy dinner party days and first horniness. Dinner parties like people getting together and trying to decide on some vague focal point in the distance that will get them all. Not people but guest lists. It didn't get them. There should have been some wrong feeling in there that wasn't just first horniness playing dress up at ways of life, first loves and breakthroughs... There were no breakthroughs! Just dinner party decisions.
Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September is not those things. It is the pain of someone in a far, far removed relationship. Maybe you don't know those people at all. You don't think it was such a good relationship. It's really for the best they aren't together anymore. "But I loved being with him even though I called him twenty times a day and he was never mine to begin with." Yeah, right. Maybe you can recall how you felt almost in love with other things. But this isn't love. It really isn't your love.
Bowen did have power over me in her mind reading capabilities. Like, I feel like I can read those minds. It beats any experience of listening in to vague shit. If you're going to get invested in someone else's relationship, at least you get the most feeling it will allow (I mean, only the involved parties really know how it feels. Taking sides? What's that?). You might as well be watching and listening for those heartbeats, even it cannot break your heart. Maybe I wanted to break theirs. Almost. If there had been more power. But I did want to listen. That's what I love about Bowen, even when I don't love her as much as I can (The Death of the Heart is my most relevant favorite).
February 3, 2013
Great art is both challenging and accessible. Elizabeth Bowen's highly wrought Modernist writing style resulted in me having to frequently re-read passages and ponder their meaning. It's not a style I enjoy. I like clarity and prefer to be led by hand.
It's a shame because she manages to evoke a clear sense of Ireland during this key period of turmoil (the troubles in 1920), and specifically how the Anglo-Irish aristocracy appear to have refused to accept that anything was wrong. This means the book takes place against a backdrop of unease and tension which Elizabeth Bowen subtly signals through symbolism and language.
After finishing the book I did some research to try and better understand the book's themes and meanings. There is a wealth of information that is not obvious to the casual reader. For example, the use of ellipsis; how, as in Greek tragedy, the action takes place offstage; and the use of pauses, unfinished sentences and awkward silence. The book's themes include feminism, sterility, colonialism, identity and so on - some of these were obvious to me, but a lot were only clear once I'd read some more informed analysis.
Ultimately I found this a frustrating book. The plot meandered, the style was frequently difficult to fathom, and I was bored as often as I was enthralled. Perhaps this is a more realistic and accurate way to portray history? In any event I was relieved to finish the book and doubt I will read any more of her work.
It's a shame because she manages to evoke a clear sense of Ireland during this key period of turmoil (the troubles in 1920), and specifically how the Anglo-Irish aristocracy appear to have refused to accept that anything was wrong. This means the book takes place against a backdrop of unease and tension which Elizabeth Bowen subtly signals through symbolism and language.
After finishing the book I did some research to try and better understand the book's themes and meanings. There is a wealth of information that is not obvious to the casual reader. For example, the use of ellipsis; how, as in Greek tragedy, the action takes place offstage; and the use of pauses, unfinished sentences and awkward silence. The book's themes include feminism, sterility, colonialism, identity and so on - some of these were obvious to me, but a lot were only clear once I'd read some more informed analysis.
Ultimately I found this a frustrating book. The plot meandered, the style was frequently difficult to fathom, and I was bored as often as I was enthralled. Perhaps this is a more realistic and accurate way to portray history? In any event I was relieved to finish the book and doubt I will read any more of her work.
November 11, 2011
An Anglo-Irish novel of manners with overtures of a buildungsroman and subtle, distilled poetry of place and time. A few of of my classmates remarked how it seemed like something written by Jane Austen- the praise is pretty high, and thematically well taken.
Some famous critic (Edward Said? Lionel Trilling? Somebody help me out here) remarked that the heroes and heroines in Austen's fiction are painstakingly indifferent to the world around them- it's all upper bourgeoise drawing rooms, garden parties, flirtations, and gossip as the world roars off somewhere in the distance, where the pillows and spices come from. Not a bad observation, if a little strident, and it might be putting the cart before the horse. I'm not an especially big believer that the novel must have a Pronounced Historical Vision, like to like and all that, but I don't think it's a detriment to try. Bowen skillfully and richly ensconces hers amid the stories of the somewhat airless, yet floatingly vapid world of the Naylors, Montmercys, soliders, intellectuals, and the women who are beginning to love them.
To be honest, it's a bit slow going, in a way even my very crude understanding of Austen never allows her to be. If we want to get political, let's get political, but I'd rather make a distinction between capital "P" politics (the world of statecraft, legislation, war, geography, public policy, taxation, parliament and democracy; Lincoln, Churchill, Bismarck, Napoleon, The economic Marx, J.M. Keynes, Pericles, Weltanstchung , what-you-will)and lower-case "p" politics (the polis , the demos , the social sphere, culture, art, social discourse, religion, philosophy, language, gender roles, race, class, sexuality, the way citizens sociologically interact with each other within the 'private' sphere, the media; Walter Winchell, the Sophists, The Marx of commodity fetishism and sociology, Freud, De Beauvoir, Zeitgeist , etc). This isn't to say that one doesn't necessarily profoundly influence the other- only a damn fool would suggest otherwise- but to emphasize the marked differentials, the dialectic, and just for the sake of sorting them out categorically.
(By the way, anybody reading this: if you know of any philosopher, social theorist, writer/critic, whoever, who has said or thought something like this, PLEASE DO recommend their work to me. This is all coming from my mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up old brain here- no authority or mastery of concept claimed or implied. I'd love to see if there's some thinker I could relate to on this, and help me flush out my understanding. Just thinking out loud here, about something which fascinates me...Please do suggest a textual relevance, of any kind, if indeed you're seeing one)
I'm sorry, but reading poetry in itself, by itself, doesn't change the direction of the country you live in (would that it could!) unless of course you're maybe a president who is so moved by Whitman or Neruda that you decide to change face on corn imports, labor jurisdiction or gay rights or whatever, or if you've organzied a body of people around the works of a poet or novelist (what would the Keatsitarian or Conradista party look like?)- which, of course, isn't totally crazy a concept if you even glance at the works and lives of (say) Tolstoy, Mishima, perhaps Pound, the Italian Futurists, just for a couple examples.
"Poetry makes nothing happen"- 100% true and 100% false. Bracingly true, in that no poem has stopped a war or built a castle on its own, i.e. done much Political work as such. Deeply false in that no one can deny what 'poetry', taken broadly to account for culture at large, can do when it galvanizes, mourns, informs, or idealizes. It can set the standard for a country or a flock of interested readers (putting aside the pesky imposition the subjective, selfsame, contrarian, persistently critical nudge inherent in everybody's cerebral cortex) and thus push the current of history one way or another, depending on who's got the most...uh, juice, if you know what I mean. (Not to say $, seats in gvt, weaponry, guns, germs, steel- don't feel like being precisely that grim today)
Poetry is all-powerful, but only within the contours of the world it creates. What its power (Emersonian "luster", the "shock of recognition", etc) can do is influence the way people think and live their lives, the values that they hold and the morality, the language they interpret (what is, that is not interpreted?)- their voices. And this spark becomes a glimmer which becomes a network of consciousness which lives as a slow burn in the collective. We are the richer for our culture, always, and in all varieties, precisely because it continues this discourse. Poetry is what is left over when the wars are done. As if they ever are.
Bowen's text belongs to the subgenre of work which keeps the 'Political' at bay, as perhaps an ambience or a stage-setting, or kept deliberately off stage entirely, and lets the 'Political' trickle into the seemingly placid, keeping-up-appearances, going-along-to-get-along, everyday signification politics of the wooden fishbowl drawing room of manners-
These might include- Austen herself (can't wait to get a real hold on her work!), Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , maybe Ethan Frome , Flaubert's A Sentimental Education , the brilliant film Y Tu Mama Tambien , Chekov's major plays, Henry James....that crackling tension between characters whose interactions may easily appear innocuous or pointless and are actually perhaps more compellingly seen as negotiations within the body politik- 'I can speak this way to you, touch or not touch you, ask you to do this or that', and so on and so forth.
I guess this could be said for pretty much any narrative but I do think that the novel of manners genre might derive the overall power and reward and relevance out of just this kind of literary detective work.
All that blather aside, I've really only half read the thing and I hope to get it finished by next Thursday...against the clock, as all great reading experiences are conducted :\
***
Finished. As usual, I enjoyed the exquisite, excruciating dialogue between thwarted lovers in the denouement. Bowen gets points in my book for canniness when applied to the discreet charm of the petty bourgeoise, amounting an Anglo-Irish schadenfreunde, when we are subtly told that now that very romance is not only a social impossibility but an existential one as well. The final page or so is somewhat over-wrought with elaborate language and imagery, though I gotta say that the cremation of the symbol of stuffy, solipsistic well-heeled provincialism does give a lovely light.
Some famous critic (Edward Said? Lionel Trilling? Somebody help me out here) remarked that the heroes and heroines in Austen's fiction are painstakingly indifferent to the world around them- it's all upper bourgeoise drawing rooms, garden parties, flirtations, and gossip as the world roars off somewhere in the distance, where the pillows and spices come from. Not a bad observation, if a little strident, and it might be putting the cart before the horse. I'm not an especially big believer that the novel must have a Pronounced Historical Vision, like to like and all that, but I don't think it's a detriment to try. Bowen skillfully and richly ensconces hers amid the stories of the somewhat airless, yet floatingly vapid world of the Naylors, Montmercys, soliders, intellectuals, and the women who are beginning to love them.
To be honest, it's a bit slow going, in a way even my very crude understanding of Austen never allows her to be. If we want to get political, let's get political, but I'd rather make a distinction between capital "P" politics (the world of statecraft, legislation, war, geography, public policy, taxation, parliament and democracy; Lincoln, Churchill, Bismarck, Napoleon, The economic Marx, J.M. Keynes, Pericles, Weltanstchung , what-you-will)and lower-case "p" politics (the polis , the demos , the social sphere, culture, art, social discourse, religion, philosophy, language, gender roles, race, class, sexuality, the way citizens sociologically interact with each other within the 'private' sphere, the media; Walter Winchell, the Sophists, The Marx of commodity fetishism and sociology, Freud, De Beauvoir, Zeitgeist , etc). This isn't to say that one doesn't necessarily profoundly influence the other- only a damn fool would suggest otherwise- but to emphasize the marked differentials, the dialectic, and just for the sake of sorting them out categorically.
(By the way, anybody reading this: if you know of any philosopher, social theorist, writer/critic, whoever, who has said or thought something like this, PLEASE DO recommend their work to me. This is all coming from my mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up old brain here- no authority or mastery of concept claimed or implied. I'd love to see if there's some thinker I could relate to on this, and help me flush out my understanding. Just thinking out loud here, about something which fascinates me...Please do suggest a textual relevance, of any kind, if indeed you're seeing one)
I'm sorry, but reading poetry in itself, by itself, doesn't change the direction of the country you live in (would that it could!) unless of course you're maybe a president who is so moved by Whitman or Neruda that you decide to change face on corn imports, labor jurisdiction or gay rights or whatever, or if you've organzied a body of people around the works of a poet or novelist (what would the Keatsitarian or Conradista party look like?)- which, of course, isn't totally crazy a concept if you even glance at the works and lives of (say) Tolstoy, Mishima, perhaps Pound, the Italian Futurists, just for a couple examples.
"Poetry makes nothing happen"- 100% true and 100% false. Bracingly true, in that no poem has stopped a war or built a castle on its own, i.e. done much Political work as such. Deeply false in that no one can deny what 'poetry', taken broadly to account for culture at large, can do when it galvanizes, mourns, informs, or idealizes. It can set the standard for a country or a flock of interested readers (putting aside the pesky imposition the subjective, selfsame, contrarian, persistently critical nudge inherent in everybody's cerebral cortex) and thus push the current of history one way or another, depending on who's got the most...uh, juice, if you know what I mean. (Not to say $, seats in gvt, weaponry, guns, germs, steel- don't feel like being precisely that grim today)
Poetry is all-powerful, but only within the contours of the world it creates. What its power (Emersonian "luster", the "shock of recognition", etc) can do is influence the way people think and live their lives, the values that they hold and the morality, the language they interpret (what is, that is not interpreted?)- their voices. And this spark becomes a glimmer which becomes a network of consciousness which lives as a slow burn in the collective. We are the richer for our culture, always, and in all varieties, precisely because it continues this discourse. Poetry is what is left over when the wars are done. As if they ever are.
Bowen's text belongs to the subgenre of work which keeps the 'Political' at bay, as perhaps an ambience or a stage-setting, or kept deliberately off stage entirely, and lets the 'Political' trickle into the seemingly placid, keeping-up-appearances, going-along-to-get-along, everyday signification politics of the wooden fishbowl drawing room of manners-
These might include- Austen herself (can't wait to get a real hold on her work!), Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , maybe Ethan Frome , Flaubert's A Sentimental Education , the brilliant film Y Tu Mama Tambien , Chekov's major plays, Henry James....that crackling tension between characters whose interactions may easily appear innocuous or pointless and are actually perhaps more compellingly seen as negotiations within the body politik- 'I can speak this way to you, touch or not touch you, ask you to do this or that', and so on and so forth.
I guess this could be said for pretty much any narrative but I do think that the novel of manners genre might derive the overall power and reward and relevance out of just this kind of literary detective work.
All that blather aside, I've really only half read the thing and I hope to get it finished by next Thursday...against the clock, as all great reading experiences are conducted :\
***
Finished. As usual, I enjoyed the exquisite, excruciating dialogue between thwarted lovers in the denouement. Bowen gets points in my book for canniness when applied to the discreet charm of the petty bourgeoise, amounting an Anglo-Irish schadenfreunde, when we are subtly told that now that very romance is not only a social impossibility but an existential one as well. The final page or so is somewhat over-wrought with elaborate language and imagery, though I gotta say that the cremation of the symbol of stuffy, solipsistic well-heeled provincialism does give a lovely light.
October 26, 2017
“Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the brightness. Somewhere, there was a sunset in which the mountains lay like glass.
Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day still coming in from the fields by the south windows was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone.”
Written in the wildly ambitious voice of a young writer, and the equally vivid, determined voice of youth itself. In Elizabeth Bowen's second novel, the reader is transported to the lax, dreamy end-game of the landed gentry in troubles Ireland, 1920. The manor is crumbling a bit, the livestock are known to wander onto the tennis courts, and the hours merge; the sunsets melt the sky.
“Visitors took form gradually in his household, coming out of a haze of rumour, and seemed but lightly, pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore great shreds from the season’s texture.”
None of this, clearly, will last very long, and Bowen builds in a visceral sense, of the voices in the rooms, the wisps of woody smoke from the fireplaces, the damp beneath the terrace stones. Really first rate characters are well-orchestrated along the arc of the book, rather than just established and then slotted in later on, as is the usual practice for the Country House Idyll sort of effort.
We will need to address the prose of second-book Elizabeth Bowen; not because it doesn't work, but because she's decided to feel the sense of enchantment and abandon in her lead character, and integrates that into the actual wordiness of the proceedings.
“He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions. Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped up the dints in her hair as she looked up again.”
Even more challengingly-- and here she's clearly in thrall to James and Woolf, her odd-couple parents-- Bowen's treatment of Point Of View is something the reader is required to chase down in order to apprehend. In the atmosphere of youth and abandon, this makes perfect sense. Later in Bowen-- The House In Paris --this will be used to exquisite effect in distilling time versus character, and rendering complex interrelationships between character and plot. For now, though, in The Last September it is something simpler.
Bowen's rotating POV-selector roves and ranges throughout the story, and shifts fleetingly between the characters. Which is tricky; there is enough stagecraft in maintaining the action (or inaction) via a single point of view. Identifying the POV we inhabit at any one time becomes unsettling for we the audience, at first. Once used to the shifts, however, we note there is always a signal, always something to cue the reader to the changes. All of the shifts and transitions will not go off smoothly here, admittedly; but this is the 'fractured narrative' that Bowen does, and as it is seen to integrate with the plotline--and ingratiate itself with the reader, can be fascinating, mesmerizing.
The setup of the POV switches comes to its natural climax in the scene of the impromptu dance at the British garrison; where the swirl of changing partners and shifting glances makes for perfectly-equivalent storytelling. The onslaught of the temperature, drink, politics and romantic intricacies is mirrored fairly perfectly with Bowen's spin-the-selector method. Come the tragic downside of all that fevered comradery --a killing in the forest by the republican partisans--- Bowen reverses the rotation and draws back to removed sources, distanced POVs, a series of tales that tell the tale. All said and done, the vividness and scatter-effect of the early telling, the rotating POVs, pays off at the crescendo as the reader is once again transitioned to onlooker rather than participant.
I know I've made this sound more complicated and confusing than it really is.. but it's worth saying what makes modern fiction be modern. The fracturing of the telling has an equivalence in the story that is being told. Things fall apart. The reader familiar with Joyce's Dubliners will continually meet with similarities--in the milieu, and in the telling.
Overall, in The Last September we have a full dress orchestration of what after all is maybe only a novella's worth of development; a whirling and splintering rendition of the locale of the story-- an Etude, but at master level.
_______________________
* there is a film version of this book, but its plotlines have been varied and retouched pretty extensively. That said, it's a valiant effort, in an over-the-top setting of the novel. And a truly stellar cast. Better a heartfelt madhouse, for this one, than a pursed-lips drawing-room nod.
Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day still coming in from the fields by the south windows was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone.”
Written in the wildly ambitious voice of a young writer, and the equally vivid, determined voice of youth itself. In Elizabeth Bowen's second novel, the reader is transported to the lax, dreamy end-game of the landed gentry in troubles Ireland, 1920. The manor is crumbling a bit, the livestock are known to wander onto the tennis courts, and the hours merge; the sunsets melt the sky.
“Visitors took form gradually in his household, coming out of a haze of rumour, and seemed but lightly, pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore great shreds from the season’s texture.”
None of this, clearly, will last very long, and Bowen builds in a visceral sense, of the voices in the rooms, the wisps of woody smoke from the fireplaces, the damp beneath the terrace stones. Really first rate characters are well-orchestrated along the arc of the book, rather than just established and then slotted in later on, as is the usual practice for the Country House Idyll sort of effort.
We will need to address the prose of second-book Elizabeth Bowen; not because it doesn't work, but because she's decided to feel the sense of enchantment and abandon in her lead character, and integrates that into the actual wordiness of the proceedings.
“He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions. Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped up the dints in her hair as she looked up again.”
Even more challengingly-- and here she's clearly in thrall to James and Woolf, her odd-couple parents-- Bowen's treatment of Point Of View is something the reader is required to chase down in order to apprehend. In the atmosphere of youth and abandon, this makes perfect sense. Later in Bowen-- The House In Paris --this will be used to exquisite effect in distilling time versus character, and rendering complex interrelationships between character and plot. For now, though, in The Last September it is something simpler.
Bowen's rotating POV-selector roves and ranges throughout the story, and shifts fleetingly between the characters. Which is tricky; there is enough stagecraft in maintaining the action (or inaction) via a single point of view. Identifying the POV we inhabit at any one time becomes unsettling for we the audience, at first. Once used to the shifts, however, we note there is always a signal, always something to cue the reader to the changes. All of the shifts and transitions will not go off smoothly here, admittedly; but this is the 'fractured narrative' that Bowen does, and as it is seen to integrate with the plotline--and ingratiate itself with the reader, can be fascinating, mesmerizing.
The setup of the POV switches comes to its natural climax in the scene of the impromptu dance at the British garrison; where the swirl of changing partners and shifting glances makes for perfectly-equivalent storytelling. The onslaught of the temperature, drink, politics and romantic intricacies is mirrored fairly perfectly with Bowen's spin-the-selector method. Come the tragic downside of all that fevered comradery --a killing in the forest by the republican partisans--- Bowen reverses the rotation and draws back to removed sources, distanced POVs, a series of tales that tell the tale. All said and done, the vividness and scatter-effect of the early telling, the rotating POVs, pays off at the crescendo as the reader is once again transitioned to onlooker rather than participant.
I know I've made this sound more complicated and confusing than it really is.. but it's worth saying what makes modern fiction be modern. The fracturing of the telling has an equivalence in the story that is being told. Things fall apart. The reader familiar with Joyce's Dubliners will continually meet with similarities--in the milieu, and in the telling.
Overall, in The Last September we have a full dress orchestration of what after all is maybe only a novella's worth of development; a whirling and splintering rendition of the locale of the story-- an Etude, but at master level.
_______________________
* there is a film version of this book, but its plotlines have been varied and retouched pretty extensively. That said, it's a valiant effort, in an over-the-top setting of the novel. And a truly stellar cast. Better a heartfelt madhouse, for this one, than a pursed-lips drawing-room nod.
February 5, 2011
The earliest Bowen I've read- not as great as Heat of the Day, but one of the best I've read. The prose is extremely dense, and beautiful; the characters are compelling; but there's not much story to speak of, and the ending's kind of unnecessary and lame. I wish I could have a chat at the bar with some of the people whose reviews complain about a lack of irony on the narrator's part, saying that Lois is self-obsessed, that everyone is self-obsessed, and that Bowen thinks this is the way things should be. I thought the book was much more ambiguous: nostalgic, sure, but nostalgic for a peace that is now seen to be morally compromising and impossible; I took the whole point of the book to be that Lois's family, in 'protecting' her (whether from her suitors or from the world at large), was actually doing her quite a degree of harm (i.e., forcing her to be ignorant of the world around her rather than allowing her to engage with it), and that any appearance of self-obsession should be read as the result of the family's actions rather than any flaw in Lois, who seems to me quite eager to break out of her narrow society, while admitting to herself the comforts of that society.
In short: a great study of how people everywhere, when faced with the breakdown of the world in which they are comfortable and greatly privileged, can pretend that that breakdown isn't happening. Also quite funny in a low-key kind of way.
In short: a great study of how people everywhere, when faced with the breakdown of the world in which they are comfortable and greatly privileged, can pretend that that breakdown isn't happening. Also quite funny in a low-key kind of way.
July 19, 2021
Written in 1928, about the Ireland of 1920: the word last in the title is very important, though subtly explored through the story. The central characters are an Anglo-Irish family, the Naylors, who have lived in Co. Cork, in a 'Big House', for generations. The country is full of British troops, attempting to quash the IRA: a guerrilla war is underway, but the Naylors and Anglo-Irish families like them are doing their best to ignore this. This is the atmosphere in which Lois is spending her summer: she has just left school, and, an orphan, lives with her aunt and uncle. Lois, like the Naylors, is coping with the war by pretending it isn't happening: she sees herself as Irish, and is frustrated by the British soldiers, but also goes to dances with them, plays tennis with them, and begins to form attachments to them.
In this novel, Bowen cleverly and subtly explores Lois's naivete against the background of the Anglo-Irish's detemination not to see what is happening, and her lost innocence against the loss of a particular way of life and kind of people. She points out the hypocrisy of both the Anglo-Irish and the British troops, and does not seem to be on anyone's side: instead she captures the atmosphere of this hot, dangerous September in a country that is in the middle of turmoil.
Bowen's writer is astute and poignant, but often very funny. She uses witty, almost surreal details, and captures the absurdity of day-to-day life, as well as people's personal quirks. I rarely type out quotes from novels, but this paragraph, describing a dinner party, amused me so much I wanted to quote it here. I couldn't bear to cut it down: it describes an old Anglo-Irish house holder at supper with his daughter, Livvy, and her friend, Lois, and two officers from the army:
Highly recommended: a very accomplished novel, but also a sensitive and funny one.
In this novel, Bowen cleverly and subtly explores Lois's naivete against the background of the Anglo-Irish's detemination not to see what is happening, and her lost innocence against the loss of a particular way of life and kind of people. She points out the hypocrisy of both the Anglo-Irish and the British troops, and does not seem to be on anyone's side: instead she captures the atmosphere of this hot, dangerous September in a country that is in the middle of turmoil.
Bowen's writer is astute and poignant, but often very funny. She uses witty, almost surreal details, and captures the absurdity of day-to-day life, as well as people's personal quirks. I rarely type out quotes from novels, but this paragraph, describing a dinner party, amused me so much I wanted to quote it here. I couldn't bear to cut it down: it describes an old Anglo-Irish house holder at supper with his daughter, Livvy, and her friend, Lois, and two officers from the army:
Mr Thompson did not entertain very much, but Lois remembered once staying to supper there, early that summer, with David and Gerald. [...] Mr Thompson's dining-room looked out on to trees, that fanned little gusts of light over the table then closed again in green darkness; it smelt of meat and there was an enormous pilastered mahogany sideboard like the front of a temple, inside which they could hear mice running about. Mr Thompson was silent - from fear, they thought, rather than disapproval - he kept drawing long black horsehairs from the seat of his chair and laying them out on the cloth. At each hair, David and Gerald leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak. But Mr Thompson went down in his collar so that they could not: they spoke to each other. And Lois, looking under her lids, had marvelled at this fortress of many opinions. His sister Miss Thompson was present, but she was deaf. The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it. 'Death of the cow,' thought Lois, and saved this up. Livvy kept looking warningly at her friends, but they were all polite. Some ducks filed in a the French window; the guests flapped with their napkins, but Mr Thompson said, 'Oh, let them be,' and sure enough the ducks went round the table with their usual urgent look and out by the window again. Mr Thompson got up and shut out the May air. 'Times change for the worse,' he said to Gerald, who agreed with him so emphatically that David had to repeat the interchange to the anxious Miss Thompson. No wonder Livvy found home dull.
Highly recommended: a very accomplished novel, but also a sensitive and funny one.
October 19, 2019
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/m000...
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/m000...
June 20, 2020
This feels like such a quiet novel. Lois Farquar, a young woman whose age isn't clear until the very end, wants to know what love is like. We learn her thoughts on the subject, not necessarily as to any particular man, just love in general. She is young and eventually her thoughts on the subject of love become more specific. The family is indescribably wealthy. They live in a mansion and their friends live in other mansions in the area. There is a tennis party - they have two courts! People just drop in for lunch or for tea.
Despite all this niceness, there is a background of tension. It is 1920, or thereabouts, and what was known as The Troubles was underway. In the novel, this is all very peripheral and scarcely mentioned. It isn't as if the reader isn't aware, though. Bowen doesn't show us any tension in the characters themselves and leaves all tension to the reader. This is not a novel of suspense by any stretch of the imagination, just that the reader is entirely aware of impending doom. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction.
Bowen takes careful reading if for no other reason than that her prose doesn't just flow. Sometimes her sentence structure is awkward. While it is awkward, it is also interesting. There is also good characterization. There is not much plot. I do have another coming up next month (The Death of the Heart) and am looking forward to it. I'll keep coming back to her, though I don't know that I'll be a completist. This didn't wow me in the way Eva Trout did. Perhaps as I think about it more this could creep across the 5-star line, but today it is in the high 4-star group.
Despite all this niceness, there is a background of tension. It is 1920, or thereabouts, and what was known as The Troubles was underway. In the novel, this is all very peripheral and scarcely mentioned. It isn't as if the reader isn't aware, though. Bowen doesn't show us any tension in the characters themselves and leaves all tension to the reader. This is not a novel of suspense by any stretch of the imagination, just that the reader is entirely aware of impending doom. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction.
Bowen takes careful reading if for no other reason than that her prose doesn't just flow. Sometimes her sentence structure is awkward. While it is awkward, it is also interesting. There is also good characterization. There is not much plot. I do have another coming up next month (The Death of the Heart) and am looking forward to it. I'll keep coming back to her, though I don't know that I'll be a completist. This didn't wow me in the way Eva Trout did. Perhaps as I think about it more this could creep across the 5-star line, but today it is in the high 4-star group.
October 11, 2019
No, I just found this incredibly dull. Honestly, I don't intend to read novels about rich, dull people; but there are just so MANY about, and it can be hard to avoid them.
November 12, 2022
ETA: For some reason this book had gotten stuck in my head (all the doors and matchsticks, probably), so when I saw it at the library I decided to give it another try. And this time through I got an absolute shedload more out of the reading.
A lot of what I was able to pick up from the book came in large part from reading "Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September: A Postcolonial Reading" by Kanako Yamaneki. Yamaneki focuses in on the tension in the book between the idle Anglo-Irish upper class and the emerging Irish War of Independence, by looking at the themes of colonization and restraint. This was hugely helpful for me in doing a revised reading of the book for myself, especially all the doorways.
According to Yamaneki, Bowen deliberately uses open doors as references to the Irish Big House value of hospitality; who opens their door to you and which doors stand open or are found shut become a whole theme.
From there, I just decided to read Danielstown as a house, rather than focusing on the novel as a whole.
Danielstown is an Irish Big House where the inhabitants engage in shutting themselves away from the realities of the deepening guerilla war going on quite literally in their own backyard.
You see rooms that stand largely empty, or are filled with dying flowers (wham! wham! goes the bat of symbolism). One sitting room where a lot of the major conversations take place is described as having windows kept closed against the outside, while also lined with a wall of mirrors. The Danielstown dining room is lined with portraits of the inhabitants' dead ancestors, all staring down at them while they eat.
These are aristocrats who only want to see themselves and their own kind. Poor Gerald, even as a blundering colonizer, does not fit their vision of who they want to see in their rooms.
There's a great moment where one of the guests, Francie, bemoans how even when she shuts the curtains in her bedroom, she can still see the great faces of the roses outside pressing insistently against the windowpane. All I could think of at that point was a similar scene in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age, where all the rioters are pressing their faces against the window to get to the imperiled heroine inside.
*chef's kiss*
From there, it's easy to read all the places where Danielstown imprisons its inhabitants, as well as theoretically protecting them, and the unending series of rooms filled with awkward chairs reads in a much sadder and more decrepit way. This is a very empty Big House, haunted by deeply unhappy people, each deeply unhappy in their own way as their preferred way of life dies around them.
Even the dining room of dead ancestors is later mirrored in an army wife's sitting room, where she maintains a wall of photographs of Irish prisoners of war, many of whom, we are told, have been killed by the British. Danielstown, as a prison, has been in operation for a very long time.
Yamaneki's reading of Gerald colonizing Lois as an unwilling conquest is spot-on, as is the analysis of Lois and Marda's trip to the old mill as being Lois' symbolic introduction to adult sexuality. What's odd to me, though, is that Yamaneki nowhere mentions how Lois is clearly struggling throughout the book to come to terms with her own bisexuality.
Bowen, who was bisexual herself, has mentioned that Lois is a stand-in for her own younger self. The novel is loosely based on experiences she had at her family's own Big House, Bowen's Court.
And then there's the text.
Lois is ambivalent about two men in the book, Gerald and the older married Hugo, and she physically recoils each time they touch her. She keeps wondering why she's not excited by their touch, mainly in letters to her best friend, Viola. So there's poor Gerald, doing his utmost to woo Lois, not knowing that she's thinking the whole time about how she just wants to go write to Viola about it:
Look, if you're with a dude, and his getting all up on you makes you obsess about writing to your girlfriend, that is a sign from the universe.
Later she runs from Gerald --"he is so terribly there" (Bowen's italics) -- because she's expecting, with a "tearing feeling of expectation" a letter from Viola.
Sis. Come on. Let's talk.
Later, when older, unmarried Marda arrives, Lois follows her around, fascinated. Marda is glamorous and unmarried, and has broken engagements in her past. Lois, to whom Marda's bedroom door is closed (theme!), knocks for admittance and then sits watching Marda paint her nails, before, in all seriousness, showing Marda her etchings. Lois later sneaks into Marda's room (door again: closed) and, finding Marda's fur coat, puts it on and buries her face in the collar.
Okay.
In The Hotel, the young heroine, struggling with her attraction to an older woman, also buries her face in the collar of the woman's fur coat.
I mean--
("She hoped for the proper agony, finding a coat she wanted...")
I swear these analyses write themselves.
Later, Lois and Marda take a trip to a decrepit old mill, and Yamaneki incisively codes their entering of it (sans Hugo, who wanders off in a huff) as weirdly erotic. While there, they encounter an IRA gunman with a (phallic) pistol, that goes off and injures Marda. So... heterosexuality. Sounds good.
Poor Lois.
As an orphan who's barely tolerated by her aunt and uncle, she's confined by Danielstown (and constantly escaping into the wild country or to army dances where veterans with shellshock throw sandwiches at her (men: this is not an effective way to woo women)) and to a large extent trapped in her dead mother's shadow as well.
She's hemmed in by women making terrible marriages -- her mother's to an Englishman, where she ends up dead; Marda's to another Englishman, where it's strongly hinted that she ends up bored out of her mind; Francie's to Hugo, where she ends up de-romantically (s)mothered; Livvy's to David Armstrong, where she ends up becoming a scandal -- and trying to talk herself into loving Gerald, mainly because he forces kisses on her and won't leave.
At the same time, Lois is an unlikely (and frankly unlikeable) heroine who acts as an agent of Danielstown's destruction. Where Francie lives in mortal terror of the roses getting in at the closed window, it's Lois who brings roses into Francie and Hugo's room and arranges them in a vase. It's Lois who brings Gerald into the house, and Lois who, if you become obsessed with the domestic architecture theme here, continues to open doors closed against her and leave them open in her wake.
And every time Lois leaves Danielstown she observes how rot is setting in around it, creeping up to it, and encroaching on it:
So at the end of the book Lois does the only sensible thing and runs away to France, leaving Danielstown to its fate.
Four stars. More matchsticks and uncomfortable chairs for everyone.
Glad we got that all cleared up.
-----
Original review:
I'm usually a huge Bowen fan, but this one left me just puzzled, more than anything else. There's a lot of casually appearing in doorways and picking up conversations that ostensibly began earlier, and a lot of conversations that consist solely of characters interrupting each other, or talking to themselves, or musing about the conversations they wish they were having, which aren't the ones the reader is currently following. A lot of things either clearly unsaid, opaquely unsaid or said in other rooms by other characters. Lots of matchsticks, Sebastian.
Actual. Matchsticks.
This leads to some fairly uneven pacing and a lot of confusing situations; by the end it felt like 200 pages of musing about interior furnishings, a minor relation's clumsiness and how self-conscious everyone should be, followed by 50 pages of Things Happening Quickly, and an abrupt ending.
It does, however, include a young woman burying her face in an older woman's fur collar, because Bowen.
A lot of what I was able to pick up from the book came in large part from reading "Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September: A Postcolonial Reading" by Kanako Yamaneki. Yamaneki focuses in on the tension in the book between the idle Anglo-Irish upper class and the emerging Irish War of Independence, by looking at the themes of colonization and restraint. This was hugely helpful for me in doing a revised reading of the book for myself, especially all the doorways.
According to Yamaneki, Bowen deliberately uses open doors as references to the Irish Big House value of hospitality; who opens their door to you and which doors stand open or are found shut become a whole theme.
From there, I just decided to read Danielstown as a house, rather than focusing on the novel as a whole.
Danielstown is an Irish Big House where the inhabitants engage in shutting themselves away from the realities of the deepening guerilla war going on quite literally in their own backyard.
You see rooms that stand largely empty, or are filled with dying flowers (wham! wham! goes the bat of symbolism). One sitting room where a lot of the major conversations take place is described as having windows kept closed against the outside, while also lined with a wall of mirrors. The Danielstown dining room is lined with portraits of the inhabitants' dead ancestors, all staring down at them while they eat.
These are aristocrats who only want to see themselves and their own kind. Poor Gerald, even as a blundering colonizer, does not fit their vision of who they want to see in their rooms.
There's a great moment where one of the guests, Francie, bemoans how even when she shuts the curtains in her bedroom, she can still see the great faces of the roses outside pressing insistently against the windowpane. All I could think of at that point was a similar scene in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age, where all the rioters are pressing their faces against the window to get to the imperiled heroine inside.
*chef's kiss*
From there, it's easy to read all the places where Danielstown imprisons its inhabitants, as well as theoretically protecting them, and the unending series of rooms filled with awkward chairs reads in a much sadder and more decrepit way. This is a very empty Big House, haunted by deeply unhappy people, each deeply unhappy in their own way as their preferred way of life dies around them.
Even the dining room of dead ancestors is later mirrored in an army wife's sitting room, where she maintains a wall of photographs of Irish prisoners of war, many of whom, we are told, have been killed by the British. Danielstown, as a prison, has been in operation for a very long time.
Yamaneki's reading of Gerald colonizing Lois as an unwilling conquest is spot-on, as is the analysis of Lois and Marda's trip to the old mill as being Lois' symbolic introduction to adult sexuality. What's odd to me, though, is that Yamaneki nowhere mentions how Lois is clearly struggling throughout the book to come to terms with her own bisexuality.
Bowen, who was bisexual herself, has mentioned that Lois is a stand-in for her own younger self. The novel is loosely based on experiences she had at her family's own Big House, Bowen's Court.
And then there's the text.
Lois is ambivalent about two men in the book, Gerald and the older married Hugo, and she physically recoils each time they touch her. She keeps wondering why she's not excited by their touch, mainly in letters to her best friend, Viola. So there's poor Gerald, doing his utmost to woo Lois, not knowing that she's thinking the whole time about how she just wants to go write to Viola about it:
While she could hold him thus -- before he receded or came too closely forward -- she wanted to run indoors and write to Viola. Viola would be certain to tell her she loved him
Look, if you're with a dude, and his getting all up on you makes you obsess about writing to your girlfriend, that is a sign from the universe.
Later she runs from Gerald --"he is so terribly there" (Bowen's italics) -- because she's expecting, with a "tearing feeling of expectation" a letter from Viola.
Sis. Come on. Let's talk.
Later, when older, unmarried Marda arrives, Lois follows her around, fascinated. Marda is glamorous and unmarried, and has broken engagements in her past. Lois, to whom Marda's bedroom door is closed (theme!), knocks for admittance and then sits watching Marda paint her nails, before, in all seriousness, showing Marda her etchings. Lois later sneaks into Marda's room (door again: closed) and, finding Marda's fur coat, puts it on and buries her face in the collar.
Okay.
In The Hotel, the young heroine, struggling with her attraction to an older woman, also buries her face in the collar of the woman's fur coat.
I mean--
("She hoped for the proper agony, finding a coat she wanted...")
I swear these analyses write themselves.
Later, Lois and Marda take a trip to a decrepit old mill, and Yamaneki incisively codes their entering of it (sans Hugo, who wanders off in a huff) as weirdly erotic. While there, they encounter an IRA gunman with a (phallic) pistol, that goes off and injures Marda. So... heterosexuality. Sounds good.
Poor Lois.
As an orphan who's barely tolerated by her aunt and uncle, she's confined by Danielstown (and constantly escaping into the wild country or to army dances where veterans with shellshock throw sandwiches at her (men: this is not an effective way to woo women)) and to a large extent trapped in her dead mother's shadow as well.
She's hemmed in by women making terrible marriages -- her mother's to an Englishman, where she ends up dead; Marda's to another Englishman, where it's strongly hinted that she ends up bored out of her mind; Francie's to Hugo, where she ends up de-romantically (s)mothered; Livvy's to David Armstrong, where she ends up becoming a scandal -- and trying to talk herself into loving Gerald, mainly because he forces kisses on her and won't leave.
At the same time, Lois is an unlikely (and frankly unlikeable) heroine who acts as an agent of Danielstown's destruction. Where Francie lives in mortal terror of the roses getting in at the closed window, it's Lois who brings roses into Francie and Hugo's room and arranges them in a vase. It's Lois who brings Gerald into the house, and Lois who, if you become obsessed with the domestic architecture theme here, continues to open doors closed against her and leave them open in her wake.
And every time Lois leaves Danielstown she observes how rot is setting in around it, creeping up to it, and encroaching on it:
Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid...
Only the massed trees -- spread like a rug to dull some keenness, break some contact between self and senses perilous to the routine of living -- only the trees of the demesne were dark and exhaled darkness. Down among them, dusk would stream up the paths ahead, lie stagnant on lawns, would mount in the dank of garden, heightening the walls, dulling the borders as by a rain of ashes...
Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it.
So at the end of the book Lois does the only sensible thing and runs away to France, leaving Danielstown to its fate.
Four stars. More matchsticks and uncomfortable chairs for everyone.
Glad we got that all cleared up.
-----
Original review:
I'm usually a huge Bowen fan, but this one left me just puzzled, more than anything else. There's a lot of casually appearing in doorways and picking up conversations that ostensibly began earlier, and a lot of conversations that consist solely of characters interrupting each other, or talking to themselves, or musing about the conversations they wish they were having, which aren't the ones the reader is currently following. A lot of things either clearly unsaid, opaquely unsaid or said in other rooms by other characters. Lots of matchsticks, Sebastian.
Actual. Matchsticks.
This leads to some fairly uneven pacing and a lot of confusing situations; by the end it felt like 200 pages of musing about interior furnishings, a minor relation's clumsiness and how self-conscious everyone should be, followed by 50 pages of Things Happening Quickly, and an abrupt ending.
It does, however, include a young woman burying her face in an older woman's fur collar, because Bowen.
September 12, 2013
My distaste for Elizabeth Bowen and Lois, the self-obsessed protagonist of her novel, The Last September , set in the face of the anti-colonial turmoil of the War for Irish Independence, is not misinformed. The character’s Anglo-Irish superiority and willful obliviousness outrages me because Bowen portrays it as entirely natural and without irony, even with an elegiac wistfulfulness that sets my teeth on edge. Lois, one could argue like the rest of her family who are all virtually unaffected by the violence outside the walls of their estate, prefers her own fantasies to reality. Am I guilty of similar transgressions when I become immersed in my work, my life, at the expense of all else? The idea makes me shudder. Bowen seems to take in stride, as if silly girls are destined to become silly women, as if that is the proper way of the world and there are no other possibilities for them.
Lois is infatuated with Gerald, a British Black and Tan, but she also briefly imagines being in love with a married friend of her uncle’s, Mr. Montmorency, who literally could have been her father as he was once in love with Lois’ mother. She is fond of making outlandish pronouncements such as, "I hate women. But I can't think how to be anything else," and dreaming up romantic, idyllic European tours where she can travel unfettered and alone (unheard of for a lady in that day) to places where people “don’t care for politics.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with those repressive and delimiting attitudes, but nevertheless, I can still resent the naïve and ridiculous mindsets they foster in these pale, privileged, delicate but useless women. (I have more respect for Molly Bloom, and as anyone who reads my work knows, Marion and I are hardly bff, because Joyce uses her as a tool to valorize an anti-intellectual purely sensual (not to mention slutty) and chauvinistic portrayal of women.) Calling Lois insufferable really doesn’t cover it. While she and her friends are obsessing over petty social slights, houseguests, the weather, and tennis parties, Gerald and his fellows at-arms are out capturing and murdering rebels and innocent civilians in the name of God and Empire without so much as a second thought. I wish I could maintain the guise of critical objectivity, but I find Lois and Bowen, as her creator, utterly abhorrent. I want to smack their smug, Ascendancy faces.
So, Gerald ends up murdered in an ambush after dumping Lois, who heads to Tours. In February, after her departure, Danielstown and the two other local Big Houses are burned to the ground. I can’t call it an entirely satisfying conclusion because Lois doesn’t seem genuinely devastated or irrevocably altered by Gerald’s death, or if she is, Bowen doesn’t do an effective job of portraying her as such. In fact, there is very little of Lois’ inner turmoil; she flees to the garden to see the last place she and Gerald spoke, but she is not weeping uncontrollably and inconsolably. She seems to stoically endure in a rather uncompelling way. Trust, I am the queen of subtlety and can find a way to rationalize pretty much any turn on a dime conversion. As previously stated, I have a very forgiving heart but there was no perceptible change.
I think the whole project of the novel is a strange one and crystallizes in Lois’ cousin, Laurence’s dreams of an alternative past, present, and future with different outcomes. Laurence is the standard laze-about abstract Oxbridge type, reminiscent of Tibby in E.M. Forster's Howards End . Lois, too, from her romance with Gerald to her friendship with Marda Norton is full of fantasy. The Naylors and the Montmorencys seem likewise willfully unaware of the conditions of violence that surround them, even if they are ostensibly offended by the actions of the army—they do nothing and barely react at all beyond some brief complaining— until one of the other officers comes to Danielstown to announce Gerald’s death. The whole environment of The Last September with its focus on minor social dramas and privileged malaise with national conflict as merely a minor annoyance in the backdrop, a ripple that barely troubles the placidly banal surface of their lives until smack-bang at the novel's end, seems to function as Bowen’s own dream of alternative universe unmarred by struggle. Yet ignorance is not bliss, but ennui.
Lois is infatuated with Gerald, a British Black and Tan, but she also briefly imagines being in love with a married friend of her uncle’s, Mr. Montmorency, who literally could have been her father as he was once in love with Lois’ mother. She is fond of making outlandish pronouncements such as, "I hate women. But I can't think how to be anything else," and dreaming up romantic, idyllic European tours where she can travel unfettered and alone (unheard of for a lady in that day) to places where people “don’t care for politics.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with those repressive and delimiting attitudes, but nevertheless, I can still resent the naïve and ridiculous mindsets they foster in these pale, privileged, delicate but useless women. (I have more respect for Molly Bloom, and as anyone who reads my work knows, Marion and I are hardly bff, because Joyce uses her as a tool to valorize an anti-intellectual purely sensual (not to mention slutty) and chauvinistic portrayal of women.) Calling Lois insufferable really doesn’t cover it. While she and her friends are obsessing over petty social slights, houseguests, the weather, and tennis parties, Gerald and his fellows at-arms are out capturing and murdering rebels and innocent civilians in the name of God and Empire without so much as a second thought. I wish I could maintain the guise of critical objectivity, but I find Lois and Bowen, as her creator, utterly abhorrent. I want to smack their smug, Ascendancy faces.
So, Gerald ends up murdered in an ambush after dumping Lois, who heads to Tours. In February, after her departure, Danielstown and the two other local Big Houses are burned to the ground. I can’t call it an entirely satisfying conclusion because Lois doesn’t seem genuinely devastated or irrevocably altered by Gerald’s death, or if she is, Bowen doesn’t do an effective job of portraying her as such. In fact, there is very little of Lois’ inner turmoil; she flees to the garden to see the last place she and Gerald spoke, but she is not weeping uncontrollably and inconsolably. She seems to stoically endure in a rather uncompelling way. Trust, I am the queen of subtlety and can find a way to rationalize pretty much any turn on a dime conversion. As previously stated, I have a very forgiving heart but there was no perceptible change.
I think the whole project of the novel is a strange one and crystallizes in Lois’ cousin, Laurence’s dreams of an alternative past, present, and future with different outcomes. Laurence is the standard laze-about abstract Oxbridge type, reminiscent of Tibby in E.M. Forster's Howards End . Lois, too, from her romance with Gerald to her friendship with Marda Norton is full of fantasy. The Naylors and the Montmorencys seem likewise willfully unaware of the conditions of violence that surround them, even if they are ostensibly offended by the actions of the army—they do nothing and barely react at all beyond some brief complaining— until one of the other officers comes to Danielstown to announce Gerald’s death. The whole environment of The Last September with its focus on minor social dramas and privileged malaise with national conflict as merely a minor annoyance in the backdrop, a ripple that barely troubles the placidly banal surface of their lives until smack-bang at the novel's end, seems to function as Bowen’s own dream of alternative universe unmarred by struggle. Yet ignorance is not bliss, but ennui.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 13, 2012
This novel is set among the Anglo-Irish upper classes, the class of Lady Gregory for Yates fans, in the 1920s. The protagonist is a young girl in her 20s whose mother has died and is in effect the ward of her aunt, Lady Naylor. The book deals with friendships and love affairs of young women of this class while the threat of the IRA hulks in the background. What is wonderful about this book is the writing. The dialogue is witty, sometimes bordering on something you would hear in Oscar Wilde. These people are as a class evasive, and the dialogue is amazingly able to make clear to the reader serious issues that are expressed but unspoken. In particular, Lady Naylor seems incapable of a sincere utterance.
Lady Naylor asserts that the protagonist and her admirer should not marry partly for lack of money, and partly because they do not understand what love means, or each what the word 'love' means to the other. She seems right to me. In a way, they are the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, who know what love is and know what love means each to the other while the opposition of their family seems to us wrongheaded. It makes sense that the heroine of The Last September should lack this knowledge, for, though we may disagree with the Montague and Capulet parents, their children grew up in an atmosphere of passionately sincere emotion and clear expression, which the people in The Last September sadly lack.
The book could be criticized for treating the Irish rebellion unfully, but only if you did not read it carefully. The threat is always looming. It could be criticized for a thin plot and for wrapping things up at the end rather rapidly.
But in a way, all I have written above is irrelevant. It is the amazing writing. Consider this paragraph:
The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the house - embracing the lawns, banks, and terraces in mild ascent - had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smoldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the brightness. Somewhere there was a sunset in which the mountains lay like glass.
Any book with paragraphs like that gets 5 stars from me.
Lady Naylor asserts that the protagonist and her admirer should not marry partly for lack of money, and partly because they do not understand what love means, or each what the word 'love' means to the other. She seems right to me. In a way, they are the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, who know what love is and know what love means each to the other while the opposition of their family seems to us wrongheaded. It makes sense that the heroine of The Last September should lack this knowledge, for, though we may disagree with the Montague and Capulet parents, their children grew up in an atmosphere of passionately sincere emotion and clear expression, which the people in The Last September sadly lack.
The book could be criticized for treating the Irish rebellion unfully, but only if you did not read it carefully. The threat is always looming. It could be criticized for a thin plot and for wrapping things up at the end rather rapidly.
But in a way, all I have written above is irrelevant. It is the amazing writing. Consider this paragraph:
The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the house - embracing the lawns, banks, and terraces in mild ascent - had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smoldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the brightness. Somewhere there was a sunset in which the mountains lay like glass.
Any book with paragraphs like that gets 5 stars from me.
September 11, 2019
The book is in 3 parts. I wasn’t really sure about this one when I started it. Bowen’s writing is quite unusual and she has sentences and thoughts scattered and then jumbled together. As I started to read part 2 the story line began to unfold and by part 3, I could see the picture Bowen was painting all along.
One has to read this one slowly and pay attention to words and the way Bowen uses them. Everything is sinister, hidden, distressed or hysterical. With the adjectives she uses to describe seemingly every day things she slowly builds up the situation and where it is all heading.
Knowing something about the time, place and events prior to reading I would say is very necessary to getting the most from this book. I feel I should read the book all over again to do justice to Bowen’s clever use of language, and maybe I will return to it. It is a book that with patience immersed me in something I had never experienced and could now feel.
From 2 stars at the beginning I upped the rating to 4 at the end.
One has to read this one slowly and pay attention to words and the way Bowen uses them. Everything is sinister, hidden, distressed or hysterical. With the adjectives she uses to describe seemingly every day things she slowly builds up the situation and where it is all heading.
Knowing something about the time, place and events prior to reading I would say is very necessary to getting the most from this book. I feel I should read the book all over again to do justice to Bowen’s clever use of language, and maybe I will return to it. It is a book that with patience immersed me in something I had never experienced and could now feel.
From 2 stars at the beginning I upped the rating to 4 at the end.
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