So, I’m not a huge fan of Important Subject books. Books that modestly proclaim on their jackets that they are Essential Reading about a Crucial Time in history that reveal Human Truths about our Darkest Hours, or authors who set soap operas in times of great stress that come with their own built in pile of cultural garbage so as to do the emotional work that their depiction of a relationship is not capable of doing. It’s almost worse when authors like this attempt to deepen their surface drama- that’s when we end up with Flowery Metaphors really should have been left back in the thesaurus they came from.Elizabeth Bowen’s book could have been one of these. It could have been a story of a young girl who falls in love with a young boy in a star-crossed situation, as Divided Loyalties draw single tears down their cheeks. It could have also been the story of Bright Young Things and their oblivious parents spinning slowly out of control, pushing aside chintz and gauze to look with confusion on the riots in the streets, seemingly vaguely Sad before turning back to their dinner party. And it was both these things. And… really, not either of them. Set in years of the Irish rebellion just after WWI, Bowen’s tale shows us a picture of an English ruling class living an increasingly tenuous existence as their lives slowly burn down, starting over the horizon where you can just barely make out a change in the air, then creeping into the forest with flickers of unsettling light at night (“Did you see that, Mama?” “I am sure it must be your imagination, my love.”), then in oversized shadows at the gate, until finally a highly Inappropriate and Dirty man interrupts their dinner. The book is, objectively, about this. A society ignoring reality as long as it is conceivably possible, its Hear No Evil, See No Evil philosophy kept intact by such firm rules and codes of conduct that those who contravene them by a hairsbreadth are immediately identified as The Enemy. The only enemy that can be identified in a war where they really can’t choose sides and remain themselves. There were parts of this story that were well done. I liked the depiction of the aunt and her rigid attempts to control everything she could while she could ( “Is he supposed to love her?” “My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he officially doesn’t.”), the vague presence of the man of the house who couldn’t control anything at all, and the conversation amongst the wives of the soldiers and Irish ladies who have to keep reminding themselves who is English and who is Irish. But I did feel like Bowen had had a bit of an Idea about this and was so excited to tell me about it, she couldn’t stop telling me, every few pages throughout most of the book. I wish she had trusted herself that she showed me the situation well enough and in so many ways that she didn’t need to tell me about it over and over again as well. Not until the end. Then, yes, please show me a man’s heavy boots walking on a red carpet, past broken vases, scattered roses and fallen chairs and crushing his cigar into the face of a fallen ancestor until it melts under gathering embers. It is a delicate thing to convey, the last moments of twilight, and I know you want to tell everyone about it when you see it. But you can’t shout, you just can’t. I know it is an early work, however, and I do make allowances for that. I think she is making a good point, and she does make me feel like the sun is going down and I can’t look away, so ultimately, she wins.Anyway, that part of the book isn’t really the reason to read this though. I’ve a shelf full of decaying empires and dying eyes, and many of them better than this in a lot of ways. Bowen’s writing truly shines on another storyline, that is, the development of the main character, Lucy. For once, the story of the young girl finding herself and falling in love IS the reason to read this, and not something to roll one’s eyes at while drinking in the atmosphere. Bowen’s rendering of Lois in her transitional stage is gorgeous and evocative, and set apart by a special talent. She has the ability to teleport me, in a blink, almost involuntarily, into standing in Lois’ shoes and looking out through her eyes. There are many books that may tell you things that you remember feeling or thinking as a teenager, but how many of them make you remember what it was like to physically be inside the skin of a teenager? From the first page, this book made me twitch and twist my body in remembered sympathy with Lois. She stands out on the drive in front of her house, on display: “she stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her.. she wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.” I could feel Lois’ fingers digging into the bones of her elbows and leaving marks because she can’t think of anything else to do to contain her embarrassment at looking ‘like other young girls’ but to literally hold it underneath her skin. I was closing my eyes and feeling the sun and thought how long could I actually do that, I’d have to look to the dogs… and then I opened them and Lois found refuge in a big, comforting dog, which meant her hands could do something else, something that looked more natural, while still allowing her to hide her embarrassment. With Lois, Bowen has no trouble moderating her tone and choosing perfect, exquisite words to bring awkward, yearning, bumbling, wanting, unsure Lois to life. Visitors to her seemingly humdrum life, however boring induce an excitement that make her unable to read, and yet she “yawns with reaction” when they appear. And of course she would be the one to observe that her fingernails were “the only part of one’s person.. of which it was possible to be conscious socially.” Then later, it makes so much sense that as she is bursting with excitement at having encountered a possible rebel in the gardens, she rushes home, but finds as she arrives that “her adventure began to diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then confidence disappeared, in a waver of shadow, among the furniture. Conceivably, she had just surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile. But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen…” Of course you can’t tell an adult, they wouldn’t understand, and its physically painful to think how they might ruin something under their gaze that makes everything normal, safe, silly or otherwise. Real experiences must be treasured and thought over a thousand times but never said out loud. Going upstairs without saying goodnight to do just that is the ultimate rebellion. I adore Lois. I adore that in her faltering, halting relationship with Gerald, she progresses and does not in a way that is consistent with the awkwardness of a girl who uses her fingernails as a social escape and does not know where her life is going. All obstacles don’t melt away because of a strong man who likes her- nor is he simply just a faraway man, an object of a Prince Charming necessary to complete a picture. He tries to start this way, offering Lois an uncomplicated, unquestioned fairy tale love- but faced with a real girl in return, he has to confront his own feelings to face her. He kisses Lois and it is everything to her, and since she is transformed, why is not he transformed? Why isn’t everything transformed? At a party, still trying to see her kiss everywhere, “She looked for his mouth- which had kissed her- but found it no different from the mouths of other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the dark, was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him.” And ultimately, Bowen creates such a painful climax as she guides Lois painfully, slowly, gorgeously through to becoming herself and finding a world in which she feels comfortable, taking a step forward to choosing a person to be… and shows that world ripped away from Lois by random, awful chance. How horrible is that? Finally comfortable enough to join a world you’ve been trained for since birth, and it was all lies. Lies adults selfishly conspired in, guiding you away from what you knew was true, until you believed them, and thought the fires in the distance mere illusions. It happens to everyone when they are finally allowed to walk through the Real World, alone, in Lois’ case, her illusions are literally shot down in the night, and then burnt down in front of her, rather than the slow, gracious realization that most people are permitted. Poor Lois. This is a book where I would welcome a sequel. How do you deal with such a betrayal? Does she join the Lost Generation in Paris and lament it in wine and dissipation? Does she try to lock it away and bury herself a replica of what she lost? Does she dare to question herself and feel in the same way again? Or does she go home and try to puzzle out what happened to her for the rest of her life? What happens?Bowen’s choice to make her story every day and ordinary and wrapped up with tea visits, carpets and hairbrushes makes this grounded enough to feel real rather than a soap opera. Her careful rendering of Lois’s vacillating identity offers us a unique window into a fragile, vanishing moment that can’t last. Her political message may have thrown me out of the narrative a few times, but her depiction of Lucy rushing down the stairs and breathlessly trying on a dashing older woman’s fur coat brought me back in. Her shouting may have made me wince, but her gorgeous whispering made me lean forward again. It almost seems she is vacillating herself, like Lois, as a writer- between excited youth and maturity. Perhaps that is why she understood Lois so well. I don’t know. But I was delighted to spend time with both of them.
An Anglo-Irish novel of manners with overtures of a buildungsroman and subtle, distilled poetry of place and time. A few of of my classmates remarked how it seemed like something written by Jane Austen- the praise is pretty high, and thematically well taken. Some famous critic (Edward Said? Lionel Trilling? Somebody help me out here) remarked that the heroes and heroines in Austen's fiction are painstakingly indifferent to the world around them- it's all upper bourgeoise drawing rooms, garden parties, flirtations, and gossip as the world roars off somewhere in the distance, where the pillows and spices come from. Not a bad observation, if a little strident, and it might be putting the cart before the horse. I'm not an especially big believer that the novel must have a Pronounced Historical Vision, like to like and all that, but I don't think it's a detriment to try. Bowen skillfully and richly ensconces hers amid the stories of the somewhat airless, yet floatingly vapid world of the Naylors, Montmercys, soliders, intellectuals, and the women who are beginning to love them.To be honest, it's a bit slow going, in a way even my very crude understanding of Austen never allows her to be. If we want to get political, let's get political, but I'd rather make a distinction between capital "P" politics (the world of statecraft, legislation, war, geography, public policy, taxation, parliament and democracy; Lincoln, Churchill, Bismarck, Napoleon, The economic Marx, J.M. Keynes, Pericles, Weltanstchung , what-you-will)and lower-case "p" politics (the polis , the demos , the social sphere, culture, art, social discourse, religion, philosophy, language, gender roles, race, class, sexuality, the way citizens sociologically interact with each other within the 'private' sphere, the media; Walter Winchell, the Sophists, The Marx of commodity fetishism and sociology, Freud, De Beauvoir, Zeitgeist , etc). This isn't to say that one doesn't necessarily profoundly influence the other- only a damn fool would suggest otherwise- but to emphasize the marked differentials, the dialectic, and just for the sake of sorting them out categorically. (By the way, anybody reading this: if you know of any philosopher, social theorist, writer/critic, whoever, who has said or thought something like this, PLEASE DO recommend their work to me. This is all coming from my mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up old brain here- no authority or mastery of concept claimed or implied. I'd love to see if there's some thinker I could relate to on this, and help me flush out my understanding. Just thinking out loud here, about something which fascinates me...Please do suggest a textual relevance, of any kind, if indeed you're seeing one)I'm sorry, but reading poetry in itself, by itself, doesn't change the direction of the country you live in (would that it could!) unless of course you're maybe a president who is so moved by Whitman or Neruda that you decide to change face on corn imports, labor jurisdiction or gay rights or whatever, or if you've organzied a body of people around the works of a poet or novelist (what would the Keatsitarian or Conradista party look like?)- which, of course, isn't totally crazy a concept if you even glance at the works and lives of (say) Tolstoy, Mishima, perhaps Pound, the Italian Futurists, just for a couple examples. "Poetry makes nothing happen"- 100% true and 100% false. Bracingly true, in that no poem has stopped a war or built a castle on its own, i.e. done much Political work as such. Deeply false in that no one can deny what 'poetry', taken broadly to account for culture at large, can do when it galvanizes, mourns, informs, or idealizes. It can set the standard for a country or a flock of interested readers (putting aside the pesky imposition the subjective, selfsame, contrarian, persistently critical nudge inherent in everybody's cerebral cortex) and thus push the current of history one way or another, depending on who's got the most...uh, juice, if you know what I mean. (Not to say $, seats in gvt, weaponry, guns, germs, steel- don't feel like being precisely that grim today)Poetry is all-powerful, but only within the contours of the world it creates. What its power (Emersonian "luster", the "shock of recognition", etc) can do is influence the way people think and live their lives, the values that they hold and the morality, the language they interpret (what is, that is not interpreted?)- their voices. And this spark becomes a glimmer which becomes a network of consciousness which lives as a slow burn in the collective. We are the richer for our culture, always, and in all varieties, precisely because it continues this discourse. Poetry is what is left over when the wars are done. As if they ever are.Bowen's text belongs to the subgenre of work which keeps the 'Political' at bay, as perhaps an ambience or a stage-setting, or kept deliberately off stage entirely, and lets the 'Political' trickle into the seemingly placid, keeping-up-appearances, going-along-to-get-along, everyday signification politics of the wooden fishbowl drawing room of manners-These might include- Austen herself (can't wait to get a real hold on her work!), Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , maybe Ethan Frome , Flaubert's A Sentimental Education , the brilliant film Y Tu Mama Tambien , Chekov's major plays, Henry James....that crackling tension between characters whose interactions may easily appear innocuous or pointless and are actually perhaps more compellingly seen as negotiations within the body politik- 'I can speak this way to you, touch or not touch you, ask you to do this or that', and so on and so forth. I guess this could be said for pretty much any narrative but I do think that the novel of manners genre might derive the overall power and reward and relevance out of just this kind of literary detective work. All that blather aside, I've really only half read the thing and I hope to get it finished by next Thursday...against the clock, as all great reading experiences are conducted :\ *** Finished. As usual, I enjoyed the exquisite, excruciating dialogue between thwarted lovers in the denouement. Bowen gets points in my book for canniness when applied to the discreet charm of the petty bourgeoise, amounting an Anglo-Irish schadenfreunde, when we are subtly told that now that very romance is not only a social impossibility but an existential one as well. The final page or so is somewhat over-wrought with elaborate language and imagery, though I gotta say that the cremation of the symbol of stuffy, solipsistic well-heeled provincialism does give a lovely light.
What do You think about The Last September (2000)?
A must read for anyone who is serious about Irsh literature in relation to 20th-century Irish history. Written in 1929 by Bowen, a woman of the Anglo-Irish landed class (her memoir "Bowen's Court" recounts the family and estate history), this novel centers on the last September of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy's position. It is 1920, and the Black and Tans are fighting the British Army in the guerrilla fighting that came to be known as the Anglo-Irish War. In 1921, the Treaty would be signed, and the Irish Civil War would break out (and , and , and). Bowen's ability to deliver the vacuous, insipid daily lives of her Anglo-Irish characters alongside a few members of the British forces and the wives accompanying British officers is stellar. The young Lois Farquar, orphaned niece of Sir Richard, faces a difficult coming-of-age in stultifying circumstances. Bowen's tone is soft and quiet. Until ...
—Vivian Valvano
There's something about the way Elizabeth Bowen writes that always (or at least in the three books I've read so far) draws me in, despite the fact that her books don't sound like the kind of thing I usually enjoy. I think it's a combination of the way she writes (I'm fond of beautiful language and interesting descriptions of ordinary things) and the fact that her characters feels like ordinary people that you might know and can imagine talking to in real life. In this book, she also has an interesting setting, a big house in the Irish countryside in 1920, in the middle of the Irish rebellion (that I know very little about, I have to admit) with the upper-class Irish landowners trying to live their lives and not thinking that things can change, the British military going to tennis parties, having dances, and searching for guns and rebels, and the ordinary Irish people in the background, with the young men hiding, lying in ambush for the soldiers, and threatening the landowners. It's an interesting feeling of Nero fiddling while Rome is burning.
—Asa
Added 9/25/13.I did not read this book. I watched the film adaptation via Netflix:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180793/?..."The Last September" (1999) "In 1920s Ireland, an elderly couple reside over a tired country estate. Living with them are their high-spirited niece, their Oxford student nephew, and married house guests, who are trying to cover up that they are presently homeless. The niece enjoys romantic frolics with a soldier and a hidden guerrilla fighter. All of the principals are thrown into turmoil when one more guest arrives with considerable wit and unwanted advice."Very stylized and hard to follow.REVIEWS:Berardinelli: http://www.reelviews.net/movies/l/las..."The Last September is a brooding, moody motion picture with a powerful atmosphere that emphasizes the sense of encroaching doom. ... The Last September does not represent a celebration of times gone by; instead, it is a sober reflection of the dangers of acting like an ostrich and sticking one's head in the sand."Ebert: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the..."Deborah Warner's "The Last September" is set during the next act of the decline of the Anglo-Irish. It takes place in 1920 in County Cork, where Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, preside over houseguests who uneasily try to enjoy themselves while the tide of Irish republicanism rises all around them. British army troops patrol the roads and hedgerows, and Irish republicans raid police stations and pick off an occasional soldier. It is the time of the Troubles."... "The movie is elegantly mounted."IMDb User Review:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180793/r..."The juxtaposition of dinner parties and political violence was perfectly done."
—Joy H.
