The Death Of The Heart (Vintage classics) [Paperback]

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.

Elizabeth Bowen could produce page-turners worthy of the best
commercial novelists, but she had a knack of making the most of
the apparently ordinary. This story of a young girl's courtship and the small betrayals which lead to the 'death of the heart' is totally engrossing and moving. It had me reading into the night with an unidentifiable sense of dread and it left me in tears.
A superb novel.

I have to admit that I read this critically acclaimed novel under some duress -- it was picked for my book group on the basis that it is one of our member's writing professor's favorite book. (It's also on the Modern Library and Time Magazine lists of Top 100 Novels, for whatever that's worth.) Unfortunately, I tend to like books with plots, and this is certainly not that -- it's more of a psychological portrait of a teenage girl as she undergoes the process of having her "innocence" utterly revoked by the social milieu she is thrust into.

Portia is a 16-year-old orphan sent to live with her half-brother and his cold and catty wife in their lovely Regency Park-fronting home in 1930s London. Having been raised in a succession of continental hotels (an experience Bowen herself had for about a decade, starting at age 12), she is wholly unprepared for the invisible and unspoken rules of the game operating in the upper-class English home she's entered. With her distant half-brother and cold sister-in-law, she struggles to locate some kind of human connection, and only manages to find it in unsuitable people such as an older head servant, or a dissolute young male "friend" of her sister-in-law (he's apparently based on the Welsh writer Goronwy Rees).

It is this latter relationship that inevitably leads to tears at the end, as her naive dreams are dashed by the self-absorption of everyone around her. It's all pretty bleak stuff, as there is not a single character in the book who lives in anything approaching happiness. It does have some appeal as a fictional ethnographic case study of a strange bygone (and peculiarly English) ecosystem, but it's hard not to wish for World War II to arrive and force these characters into doing something useful and thinking about something other than themselves.

Although it's not a book I can imagine recommending to many people, it is worth checking out if you're the kind of reader who likes to linger over every sentence, picking it up, turning it around, and examining it from every angle. The language is rich enough to warrant this kind of close reading -- even if it didn't generally strike a chord with me. It's also worth reading by anyone with an interest in the interwar era or in the manifestation of class in Britain at the time. Note: The novel was adapted as a miniseries for BBC television in 1985, however this version remains unavailable on DVD.