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- Published on: 1700
- Binding: Hardcover
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
By J C E Hitchcock
Following the death of her parents, the sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne comes to live with her older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna. Although they are brother and sister, Thomas and Portia have had very different lives. He, in his late thirties, is a wealthy advertising executive, who has also inherited money from his mother and lives in one of the elegant Regency terraces surrounding Regent's Park. She is the family's guilty secret, the daughter of Thomas's father by his second wife. The elder Mr Quayne, a seemingly respectable middle-aged businessman, was divorced by his first wife after getting his mistress, Portia's mother, pregnant. As a result he was banished from polite society in England, and Portia has spent her entire childhood living in various seedy hotels on the Continent.The book is divided into three sections, entitled "The World", "The Flesh" and "The Devil". The first and last sections are set in London, the middle one in the Kentish seaside town of Seale-on-Sea, where Portia goes to stay with Anna's old governess, Mrs Heccomb, while Thomas and Anna are abroad. (Seale, a fictitious town probably based on Hythe near Folkestone, also features in a later Elizabeth Bowen novel, "The Heat of the Day").Portia is a quiet, naive and unworldly girl, who finds it difficult to fit into the fashionable world of her brother and sister-in-law. Thomas is a rather dull individual whose main preoccupation is making money, Anna a glamorous and sophisticated, if cold and conventional, society hostess, with a number of suspiciously close male friends,. Neither of them welcome having Portia staying with them, and take her in reluctantly out of a sense of duty. Anna in particular resents Portia, whose innocence is at odds with her own worldliness. Portia also seems out of place in Seale; although Mrs Heccomb treats her kindly, she cannot fit in with Mrs Heccomb's children Dickie and Daphne and their "fast" set of fun-loving friends.Portia has fallen in love with Eddie, a rather useless young man who is one of Anna's protégés (and possibly one of her former lovers, although Bowen is never explicit on this point). After being sent down from Oxford, Eddie has tried becoming a writer, abandoning that career after his first, satirical, novel upset too many people, and currently works in Thomas's agency, where Anna has found him a position, despite his having neither a liking nor an aptitude for the advertising business. The bored, cynical Eddie and the innocent young Portia are, of course, quite unsuited to one another, but she is too besotted with Eddie to notice his bad points. Only when she invites him to Seale for the weekend and he spends most of his time flirting with Daphne Heccomb does she realise that he might not be the man of her dreams. Portia has been confiding her intimate thoughts to her diary; when she discovers that Anna has been invading her privacy by reading this, she takes a drastic step.Elizabeth Bowen demonstrates in this book her gift for descriptive writing; I was particularly struck by the opening chapter, in which she conjures up a vision of Regent's Park on a frosty January evening. Her main concerns, however, were characterisation and in social and psychological analysis. This is not a book which will appeal to those who like their fiction be packed with physical action; the most interesting action is that which takes place in the minds of her characters, especially Portia. The "death" of the title is a metaphorical one, as Portia's innocent idealism is shattered by the cynicism and heartlessness of Anna, Eddie and their set. "The Death of the Heart" is a sensitive, finely-written novel which justifies its owner's reputation as one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
By Amazon Customer
Kept me wanting to know what could happen next right up to the last page and I'm still pondering on what could have happened after that.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
By Nina-Jo Rees
Elizabeth Bowen has a reputation for being a 'writer's writer', Ian McEwan has acknowledged his debt to her work. 'In the Heat of the Day' may be better known than this book, but it bears the same stamp of Bowen's in-depth psychological insight and a fine ability to evoke time and place. Her world is often London during, before and after the world war two and no-one has evoked the city and its diurnal and seasonal moods better. Here is Regent's Park and the glamorous London that seems untouched by the war, in the late 40's or early 50's.Set amongst the largely idle, weathy, upper class set of post-war London's elite, the story is a 'coming of age novel', in a broad sense. Other reviewers have neatly recapped the plot so my point is to emphasise the sensitivity of the writing and to praise the heart-wrenchingly vivid portrait of a young girl, on the verge of adulthood whose vulnerablity and open-heartedness is exploited and vilified by those adults who should be caring for her. There is no physical abuse, it is the careless cruelty of the adult who has forgotten or never knew the sufferings of childhood.In this, novel here bears some ressemblence to James's 'What Maisie Knew', in its use of the child's perspective to point up and emphasise adult corruption and veniality. But Maisie had someone to look out for her, Portia the heroine, has no-one and the reader feels acutely anxious for her. The final chapters are heart-breaking, it's true, but worth reading in order to understanding the message of the book, which is this: the corruprion of innocence is the most deadly of crimes and can be comitted by people who are merely careless, thoughtlessly cruel. And the damage is irrevocable. Childhood, the novel tells us, is not a time for the faint-hearted and if you can survive the deeply perplexing and frightening transition from innocence to experience unscathed, then nothing else life can throw at you will ever hurt so much.
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