Even the core of the plot is left for the reader to infer. Harrison, a mysterious figure who claims to be working for counter-intelligence, tells Stella, the main protagonist, that her boyfriend Robert is spying for the enemy. Stella seems to assume that, if she agrees to sleep with him “to form a disagreeable association” (Ch 2) in her words, Harrison will not inform on Robert. She spends most of the novel deciding what to do and whether she should tell Robert.
The novel is set in wartime London, a time and place of liminality. “War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that.” (Ch 10) The blitz as such is over, the second blitz (of the V1 and V2 rockets) has not yet begun. The present is seen as the no-man’s land between the past and the future: “vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past.” (Ch 5) Although time seems to be set and fixed - the novel starts precisely on “the first Sunday of September 1942” (Ch 1); other key events of the novel are tied to specific events during the war - and despite the plethora of clocks, time is actually fluid. For example, it seems to move more slowly when we leave London. In Robert’s family home "the grandfather clock ... must have stood there always - time had clogged its ticking." (Ch 5). In Cousin Nettie’s care home the owner “Mrs Tringsby ... does not know what time it is unless she looks at the clock” (Ch 11). Meanwhile, at the Irish estate of Cousin Francis, “by travelling west you enter longer days; this hour ... seemed to be outside time - an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire’s flutter and the clock’s ticking out there in the hall were to be heard ... she could have imagined this was another time, rather than another country, that she had come to.” (Ch 9) Characters regularly look at clocks (when we first meet Stella she is hearing her clock strike eight, chapter 14 ends with Robert looking at a clock etc) but even they are unreliable: Louie’s alarm clock fails to go off in the morning (Ch 13), and when Stella first meets Robert their wristwatches do not show the same time which comes to symbolise their relationship “by never perfectly synchronizing” (Ch 5).
Although place seems, like time, to have a strong connection to reality, in fact the places mentioned are, as they can be in wartime when the ebb and flow of armies redraws the map, fluid. Thus, Stella lives in more than one flat. Similarly, Robert’s family has lived in a number of homes, and the one they are in at present was put up for sale almost as soon as they moved in. Harrison says he lives in three places. Cousin Francis leaves his estate in Ireland and comes to England where he dies and is buried; when Robert visits the graveyard he cannot locate the grave (the stone is not up yet). In particular, London is seen as a place which is in flux (because of the bombing) and contrasted with the estate in Ireland which represents permanence and continuity between the past and the future.
This liminal fluidity and instability applies to the characters. “It was a characteristic of life in that moment and for the moment’s sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them.” (Ch 5) Robert and Harrison are spies who, by their nature, are not what they seem; both characters also have physical asymmetries, Robert with his limp (and even that “inequality” changes: “at times he could control it out of existence, at others he fairly pitched along with an impatient exaggeration of lameness”; Ch 5) and Harrison with his eyes, one of which appears to be higher than the other. Cousin Nettie is feigning madness. Louie, orphaned by a bomb and her husband fighting abroad, lurches from lover to lover. Few of the characters have complete histories. We know next to nothing about Harrison and not a lot more about Stella and they are antagonist and protagonist! Stella herself describes her relationship with Robert in terms of impermanence: “we are friends of circumstance - war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” (Ch 10)
Much of the dialogue is ambiguous. No-one ever says anything definite. A major driver of the plot is Harrison suggesting to Stella that, if she sleeps with him, he won’t arrest Robert but he never actually puts it in those terms. The nearest we come to it is Stella saying “I’m to form a disagreeable association in order that a man be left free to go on selling his country” (Ch 2). And when she says “A friend is out of danger” this seems to be as close as she gets to agreeing to Harrison’s proposition. Perhaps the most straightforward speakers are Cousin Nettie (who is mad) and Donovan, both of whom give answers to Roderick’s questions as though they were oracles, despite being outsiders.
And the ultimate outsider is, of course, the ever-elusive Harrison, who is puppet-master, controlling how the others behave, as if he were the author herself, or a god, the creator of the drama, omniscient (he can tell from Robert’s behaviour not only that Stella has told him he is suspected but also when she told him) but himself utterly unknowable. Robert asks Stella “is he anybody?” (Ch 10) Louie looks for Harrison in the park but “as she feared was probably, failed to see him.” (Ch 8) Or perhaps he isn’t God but the Devil, sent to tempt Stella only to reject her when she at last agrees to be tempted.
This book seems to be about the nature of truth, in particular narrative truth. Louie reads the newspapers and seems to construct her identity, or measure it, by reference to what the newspapers tell her. There are ironic references to the manipulation of the facts presented in the newspapers: “Once you looked in the papers you saw where it said, nothing was so bad as it might look. What a mistake, to have gone by the look of things! The papers knew Britain had something up her sleeve - Britain could always, in default of anything else, face facts.” (Ch 8) Meanwhile, in Germany, “I was told how they swallow anything they are told ... they do have papers, but not like our ones with ideas. It said how to get them through the war they have to kid them along, but how the war makes us think.” (Ch 8) And there are repeated references throughout the book to the telling of stories: “One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having to be a beginning somewhere.” (Ch 7); “Where, at the start, the story came from I don’t know. ... Whoever’s the story had been, I let it be mine. ... It came to be my story, and I stuck to it ... then it went on sticking to me: it took my shape and equally I took its.” (Ch 12); “What story is true? Such a pity, I sometimes think, that there should have to be any stories. We might have been happy the way we were.” (Ch 11)
Truth, then, depends on how we see it. One of the other motifs of the book is reflection; we can see ourselves (and others) by means of a mirror and also by means of a photograph. In chapter 2, Harrison, in Stella’s flat, searching for an ashtray, comes “face to face with the mirror and photographs”, one of which is of Stella’s son Roderick and the other of Robert. When Roderick goes there, seeing the reflections of the lights in the glass of pictures, he reflects “This did not look like a home, but it looked like something - possibly a story.” (Ch 3) When Stella goes to the funeral in chapter 4 she sees Roderick’s father’s people reflected in a “tarnished mirror”. When she sees Robert’s room in his family home there are “sixty or seventy photographs ... hung in close formations on two walls. All the photographs featured Robert ... he was depicted at every age.” Robert describes these as a “pack of his own lies”. (Ch 6) Louie writes to her absent husband Tom that she looks at his photograph daily which is “one more misrepresentation of love’s unamenable truth” since she only picks it up and dusts around it. (Ch 8) At the ancestral home in Ireland “By anyone standing down by the river looking up, sky was to be seen reflected in row upon row of vast glass panes ... reflections up from the river prolonged daylight.” Stella looks “from mirror to mirror, into misted extensions of the [drawing] room.” (Ch 9). Meanwhile Cousin Nettie doesn’t have a photo of her family home: “why should I want a picture of anything I have seen?” (Ch 11)
It’s rather heavy-going. I have previously quoted from chapter ten in which Stella says “war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when facing an existential crisis, Bowen’s characters can’t resist discussing everything, in long-winded, often ambiguous sentences whose syntax is sometimes twisted almost beyond recognition. I didn’t really get into the book until I’d read half. Part of the problem is that it isn’t realistic and there aren’t sharply defined characters (despite all those mirrors I have little idea what any of the major characters actually looked like). There is, I think, a huge amount of symbolism to find and I think my discussion above has only touched the surface of what is a multiply-layered, deep and complex novel. Fascinating ... but hard work.
Does Stella visit Hell? Spoiler alert!
One of the key scenes comes in chapter 12. In chapter 10, Stella has told Robert that Harrison thinks he is a spy; Robert has denied it, angrily accused Stella of not trusting him, and then proposed marriage to her. In chapter 11 Roderick visits the slightly barmy Cousin Nettie. Chapter 12 then returns us to Stella who is with Harrison. He takes her to an underground “bar or grill which had no air of having existed before tonight.” Those eating at the counter, seen from the back, are described in detail; a member of my U3A described this as like an Otto Dix painting of decadent cafe life during the Weimar Republic. “Not a person did not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the fact of being human” except, presumably, the dog with the studded collar and the unreadable brass nameplate. These people talk incessantly but inaudibly. The room has “more the look than fact of overpowering heat”. Stella describes it as a “lie-detecting place”. They eat a lobster salad. They discuss the fact that Roderick has just discovered that his parents divorced because of his father’s infidelity, rather than his mother’s as she has always told him; she has been lying to him all these years. Harrison then tells Stella that she has been “naughty”, she has been less than frank with him, because she has tipped Robert off that Harrison knows he’s a spy. “What do you think I’m for?” asks Harrison. She looks at the diners again and wonders who they are; he says they are the “usual crowd”. But Stella notices that one of them (Louie) recognises Harrison; he tries to avoid looking at Louie. Harrison says that, thanks to Stella, there is no more reason to leave Robert “loose”, things will have to “take their course”. The dog is now bothering them and Harrison tries to kick it away. Stella realises she will have to make a decision about whether to “buy out Robert” (presumably by having sex with Harrison). But now Louie approaches the table, claiming (with transparent dishonesty) that the dog belongs to her, or her friend. Harrison tells Louie “you’d better beat it home. You’ll only be landing yourself in more trouble.” Louie reveals that she met Harrison in the park and pushes the dog away “as though it would be safest as far away as possible”. She says she is surprised that Stella is with Harrison who she describes as “wicked”. Stella hints that she will surrender herself to Harrison at which point he tells them both to go away together. Stella asks what he intends to do and he says, “Pay the bill. Do you think a bill pays itself?”
I think that in best ‘Hero’s Journey’ manner, this is intended to be the visit to hell. It is underground and hot. There is a hell hound, though it only has a single head and doesn’t guard the entrance. The inhabitants are as grotesque as those inhabiting Dante’s Inferno. Harrison is either Mephistopheles, bring Stella to the cusp of signing away her soul (represented here by her chastity) or Lucifer himself, presiding over this scene. But Louie somehow redeems Stella, perhaps by admitting her own unchasteness, her own infidelity to her absent soldier husband, excusing herself as just trying to be friendly, no worse than the dog. This is the trigger that seems to release Stella from the devil’s clutch.
Selected quotes:
- “She had found all men to be one way funny like Tom - no sooner were their lips unstuck from your own than they began to utter morality.” (Ch 1)
- “A scale or two adhered to the fishmonger's marble slab; the pastrycook’s glass shelves showed a range of interesting crumbs; the fruiterer filled a longstanding void with fans of cardboard bananas and a ‘Dig for Victory’ placard; the greengrocer’s crates had been emptied of all but earth by those who had somehow failed to dig hard enough.” (Ch 4)
- “One thing he should do at once is take the roof off the house, or they’ll be popping nuns in before you can say knife.” (Ch 4)
- “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 ... drawing on this tomorrow they had expected.” (Ch 5)
- “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” (Ch 5)
- “If I’d seemed to dream I saw a chap at the foot of my bed going through my pockets, I’d take a look through my pockets first thing next morning.” (Ch 7)
- “Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts? Nothing keeps innocence innocent but daylight. ... how can any truth not go bad from being underground?” (Ch 12)
- “Anne, if you keep saying ‘I know’ you will have to go back to bed immediately. As it is, you will go back to bed at once.” (Ch 14)
March 2023; 389 pages
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