Book Reviews

SECOND READING: 19  The Last SeptemberA LIVELY YOUNG GIRL becomes aware of the tensions between what she wants and the social expectations of her elders in Elizabeth Bowen's complex, sophisticated and exuberant second novel, published when she was 30. It is set in the Ireland of the War of Independence.

Young Lois Farquar is an orphan living the life of an Anglo-Irish girl in Danielstown, her family's atmospheric ancestral home, presided over by her uncle, Sir Richard Naylor.

Having left school she now considers romantic disaster immensely attractive. Her cousin, Laurence, who is staying at the house, is at present the closest she has to a sparring partner. He is determinedly remote and bookish.

"It still surprised her" Lois reflects early in the novel, "that Laurence, who looked ethereal, should spend so much time when he was not being intellectual thinking about food. She supposed that this was because he had, as he once had said, no emotional life."

Into this closed, comfortable world of tennis parties and polite gatherings, arrive guests. Hugo Montmorency, who has known Danielstown since boyhood, is married to the delicate Francie. Hugo had once been in love with Lois's mother, Laura, Richard Naylor's sister, now dead yet still a presence.

Their visit breaks a ten year absence; a decade during which Lois has grown up. Bowen brings the house to life, just as the sound of the motor driving up the avenue under the trees, injects a sense of excitement in the inhabitants. In Francie, Bowen has created a perceptive semi-invalid outsider, conscious that others "may well say she had taken the brilliant young man he'd once been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her dresses."

The dynamic between the couple is superbly drawn: "Francie's delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed. Hugo, wandering at the end of the bed, looked at her feet thoughtfully." Meanwhile Bowen who looks as closely to Henry James and Edith Wharton as she does to Somerville and Ross, and remains a major influence for William Trevor, evokes the frenetic imagination of Lois who, eager to assert herself, decides it would be useful to suffer the agonies of loving a married man such as Hugo.

The tennis parties and social bustle continue as the British soldiers frequenting the various gatherings seek out IRA men. Lois has a slightly irritating, to her, friend, Livvy, who rides over almost every day, particularly at meal times. Their high speed conversations are breathless and funny. They plot; Livvy makes plans. Each meeting ends with Livvy galloping home. "She rode away. Lois listened until the romantic horse-hoofs had died on the avenue, smothered in trees. This manner of Livvy's of coming and going gave her a setting - picaresque, historical somehow. She would have been much worse if she had ridden away on a bicycle."

Beyond the Wildean wit, inspired dialogue, vivid characters, the various intrigues, such as Lois's tentative relationship with a doomed soldier and the magnificent comic turn achieved through the personality of the many times engaged Marda Norton who appears finally about to wed, is not only the sinister political turmoil and the death throes of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy but Bowen's personal and artistic dilemma as a landed Irish Protestant suspended between two deceptively close but alien cultures, the Irish and the English, never fully belonging to either.

This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits the literary canon