"The House in Paris" by Elizabeth Bowen

I struggled to enjoy this book.

Two children, Henrietta Leopold, meet at a house in Paris. The Fishers, mother and daughter, are acting as chaperones for Henrietta, who is between trains. Illegitimate Leopold is to meet his mother for the first time since she had him adopted as a baby. Madame Fisher is upstairs, dying. In the second part of the book, we visit the past to learn the circumstances of Leopold's parenthood. Finally, we return to the present for the crisis.

Not that it is a crisis. Everything in this book is so understated and polite you'd find more excitement in a dropped teaspoon at one of Jane Austen's gatherings.

A S Byatt, in her introduction, calls this "a model of good writing, an example of how to be precise about thought, emotion, passion and character." Hmm. I must have missed the passion. The prose is elegant but the standards of 'good' writing must have changed. When Madame Fisher finally tells Leopold the story of his conception and birth in 3.2, it is done as an extended exposition, an information dump, in long coherent paragraphs of dialogue, even though we are told “the last part of the story had laboured out in jerks, with agonised flaggings, and pauses that seemed not to know how they could end.” As marvellous as this description is, how much better if the preceding paragraphs had actually shown us a flavour of this. In 3.3 a ‘talking heads’ section of dialogue gives way to another extended exposition, as if the author is aware she is running out of pages and needs to give the reader all the information, like a set of captions at the end of a movie.

Sometimes the narrator sees things from the PoV of one of the characters ( although their thoughts sometimes seem to be too old for the children, eg: “His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.”; 1.2) but fundamentally an omniscient third person narrates in the past tense with occasional authorial intrusions directly addressing the reader, eg:

• “There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.” (1.2)
• “Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own.” (2.1)
• “Actually, the meeting he had projected could take place only in Heaven - call it Heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word.” (2.1)
• “To foresee pleasure makes anyone a poet.” (2.11) Is that pompous or simply utterly ridiculous?

As usual, we are in the world of the gentry. Even if they have to work, it isn’t exactly toil. Mr Michaelis must leave for the office at half-past-nine every day and Madame Fisher makes ends meet by hosting a couple of young ladies in her Parisian house. Max can’t afford to marry but he is sufficiently well-off to travel by train and boat and train to a hotel room for a dirty weekend. The book was written in 1935 but there is no hint of the catastrophic social changes unleashed by the first world war: the middle class are very comfortable, thanks to inheritance. “She thought: Servants are terrible: why should they share one’s house?” (2.7)

I enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen's The Heart of the Day on second reading after a discussion in my reading group convinced me there was more to it than I had initially appreciated. A S Byatt, who has read this novel several times, seems to have had different reactions to it at different periods of her life. I look forward to being convinced that I've missed something.

Selected quotes:

• “Feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, she badly wanted some place in which not to think.” (1.5)
• “The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can.” (1.5)
• “You make him sound like a man who cannot pass a looking-glass.” (2.4)
• “Without their indistinctness things do not exist.” (2.6)
• “In her parents’ world, change ... meant nothing but loss. To alter was to decline.” (2.7)
• “Like rain on the taxi windows, soft affections and melancholies blurred her mind.” (2.11)
• “She was not of the generation that fingers things on a mantlepiece.” (2.11)
• “One leg writhed round the other like ivy killing a tree.” (3.1)
• “Why should I have to kiss them when I wish every time I have to that their faces would fall off, like the outsides of onions.” (3.2)

February 2026; 239 pages

Originally published in 1935 by Gollancz

My paperback Vintage Classics edition was issued in 1998

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God