I thought the Elizabeth Bowen recommendation came from Molly Young's newsletter,
Read Like the Wind, and perhaps it did – but if so it must have been one of the "Why Don't You..." suggestions, because I can't seem to find her mentioned elsewhere. In any case, I picked up
The Heat of the Day as well as
The Death of the Heart some time ago. Last month, I was in Baltimore for the day with my dad where we met up with one of my oldest friends and drove around looking at different neighborhoods and visiting various bookstores. As we browsed the fiction shelves at
Normal's, my friend pulled down a copy of
The Heat of the Day. "Hey, I have that book and I keep almost reading it," I said. This friend was part of one of the book clubs that I joined during the pandemic; a book club that recently sort of fizzled out. And so, we thought, why not revive the book club and read this? I heard from my friend that she started the book in late June. Meanwhile, I was traveling for 2 weeks and not reading much. And furthermore, we hadn't actually set a date to read it by or, as far as I know, communicated to anyone else that it was the new book club selection. But, in any case, I went ahead and started it last week and finished it this afternoon.
It's odd that this book is called The Heat of the Day when nearly all of it seems to take place at night – and in mid- to late Fall at that. There is, I thought, mostly a sense of chill throughout this book. Set in London in the midst of World War II, the book bears witness to the falling away of social norms and constraints as those who remain in the city live through the bombings, the constant fear that a loved one will be killed, the decay of trust. The book mainly centers on Stella, a widow of about 40, who has been told that her lover Robert, a slightly younger former Captain wounded at Dunkirk, has been accused of giving secrets to the enemy. We are with her in her dilemma, unsure what to believe. Other characters, the man who has made the accusation, Stella's son – a young soldier, a young woman named Louie who chances to meet the accuser, float in and out of the book, often on tangents unrelated to the main narrative. Or, perhaps, Stella and her lover are not the main narrative at all. Rather, it's wartime London and these are the characters that inhabit it.
