The Heat of the Day (1948)
389pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-06-20
econd World War noir – the setting, London post blitz, is ultra specifically recreated. The language is incredible, poetic and fluid but also super idiomatic, especially the dialogue which reads like how my grandmother spoke; stilted and full of now unfamiliar elisions.
The novel took me a while to get through, I found I’d often have to re-read a page to grasp what was going on. The unfamiliarity was compounded by the fact that the war and the nature of the plot (espionage, blackmail) circumscribes certain topics for the characters and those need to be addressed glancingly, between the lines.
Anyway, the very specific evocation of the time and place is really impressive, the psychic landscape of London in war time feels fully realised. This whole pandemic thing has shown how quickly we can adapt to different normalities, how quickly new modes of being – socially speaking – can become norms. It’ll be interesting to see in years to come which writers can successfully reach back, recognise and capture that alien feeling of the early weeks of the pandemic as well as Bowen captured the febrile war time atmosphere.