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415 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence—not as today's dead but as yesterday's living—felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected—for death cannot be so sudden as all that.—or the living:
The very temper of pleasures lay in their chanciness, in the canvaslike impermanence of their settings, in their being off-time—to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other's places moved the little shoal through the noisy nights. Faces came and went. There was a diffused gallantry in the atmosphere, an unmarriedness: it came to be rumored that everybody in London was in love.Stella Rodney, Bowen's protagonist, a divorced woman approaching 40, is certainly in love, and has been for the past two years. She met Robert Kelway, a veteran of Dunkirk now working at the War Office, at the beginning of the bombing in 1940; it is now 1942. I was struck, though, by how long Bowen takes to introduce us to Kelway. Like Graham Greene would do in his own great wartime romance novel, The End of the Affair, published three years after Bowen's in 1951, she begins when the relationship is already under threat: Stella gets a visit from a mysterious man called Harrison who tells her that Robert is a spy, but appears to be willing to trade Stella's love for his silence. It is not just a matter of structure: Harrison is a quintessential Greene character, and the topic of spy and counterspy is Greene's bread and butter—but it sits uneasily on Bowen's table.
She had trodden every inch of the country with him, not perhaps least when she was alone. Of that country, she did not know how much was place, how much was time. She thought of leaves of autumn crisply being swept up, that crystal ruined London morning when she had woken to his face; she saw street after street facing into evening after evening, the sheen of spring light running on the water towards the bridges on which one stood, the vulnerable eyes of Louie stupidly carrying sky about in them, the raw earth lip of Cousin Francis's grave and the pink-stamened flowers of that day alight on the chestnuts in May gloom, the asphalt pathway near Roderick's camp thrust up and cracked by the swell of ground, mapped by seeded grass….