This novel is, at its most obvious level, a comedy of manners. A few days after finishing it, I find myself speculating about Elizabeth Bowen's choice of writing about the overthrow of British rule in Ireland by way of this particular form. Bowen was a modernist, and so I can easily imagine that while writing this novel she might have been wary of falling into a nostalgic tone; so perhaps that accounts for her choice. This "comedy" ends not in marriage, though, but in a series of departures and separations, a violent offstage death, and the post-narrative burning down of the primary scene of the story.

The narrative is pretty much fixed on an Anglo-Irish aristocratic circle whose status and way of life depend entirely on British rule-- but not only on their complex, finely drawn interpersonal relations, but also (or especially) on the ironies of that dependence. I suppose Bowen's interest in the ironies are, actually, fairly well served by a comedy of manners. The best bits for me, though, are the occasional moments in the narrative when the atmosphere rather than the characters' quirks and interpersonal tensions dominates the narrative. My favorite example of this is the first description of an abandoned mill that a few paragraphs later becomes the scene of an awkward collision between the comedy of manners and the scene of political strife that constantly strains against the limits of comedy of manners:

Mounting the tree-crowded, steep slope some roofless cottages nestled under the flank of the mill with sinister pathos. A track going up the hill from the gateless gateway perished among the trees from disues. Banal enough in life to have closed this valley to the imagination, the dead mill now entered the democracy of ghostliness, equalled broken palaces in futility and sadness; was transfigured by some response of the spirit, showing not the decline of its meanness, simply decline; took on all of a past to which it had given nothing.

That last sentence could almost be taken for the novel's summing up of the castles and mansions that burn, and the aristocrats who evacuate the scene, at the end of the book. ( )

I don't have much to say here--I found the writing uninspired, and the characters unlikable as well as uninteresting. I might have enjoyed this had it been a novella, but as is, it simply dragged on for me with one needless character blending into another even as one meaningless conversation blended into one more. Simply, I saw the intent, but was incredibly bored by the process and outcome. ( )

The novel is set in 1920 and while the Irish war of independence rages outside the gates of their County Cork home, Sir Richard Naylor and his Anglo-Irish family continue their privileged life of tea and tennis. Bowen's 1929 novel is a strongly autobiographical portrait of a lost class marking out its final moments — every garden party, every house guest and every flirtation is touched by a sense of impending extinction, all delineated by her precise prose. One more reason to return to Elizabeth Bowen for good reading. ( )

The Last September is a book I could not get into. I read 77 pages of it and found myself utterly bored with it. Descriptions of boring rich people talking just does not excite me.

The core of The Last September is the story of a young woman (Lois) coming of age in a grand country house. But if you think from that description that you know what to expect, you're probably wrong. Yes, there's a young man on the horizon, yes, there are family tensions, and yes, there are elements of the awkward comedy of class stratifications. But the focus is much more on the psychological - so, for example, one of the house guests (a married man) becomes attracted to another visitor. Nothing actually happens between them - but the book focuses on the emotional ripples it sends through the house (as it turns out, everyone is aware of the attraction). One very funny - but poignant - scene shows a conversation between the two, where she is uncomfortably aware of his feelings, and trying - without being blunt - to head off any declaration of devotion.

Lois is extremely self-conscious in her new adulthood, always seeing herself from outside. She knows she is supposed to be fun-loving, reckless and happy, and she tries to appear so, largely in order to fit in. But she is always unsure of what she should do. Walking with her young admirer Gerald, "conscious of many people's attention, she did not know if she seemed enviable or foolish". The relationship between them is also beautifully drawn. Gerald is uncomplicatedly in love with her, and while she does not care for him in the same way - indeed, she hopes that life and love will hold something more for her - she is still much more conscious of him, his feelings, his presence, than he is of her. Ultimately, both of them are trapped by the artificiality of the social structures which surround them - mainly in terms of the 'acceptable' ways in which men and women are permitted to interact.

The background to all this is aristocratic Anglo-Irish life in the 1920s, painted as very much dislocated from the land. Life in the house is all empty formality, and the grand families are both patronised by the recently arrived English military families and alienated from the rural Irish families who live around them. There is a lot of depth to this as well - another reader might have focused as much on the question of Anglo-Irishness or on the symbolism of the house and land as on Lois' character.

Reading this back, it all sounds rather depressing. But this was a book I really enjoyed reading - it contains a lot of humour and acute psychological insight, as well as just being beautifully written. This is one of those books where you feel that every sentence has weight, even if sometimes the significance is only apparent later. It almost feels like a distillation of a much thicker book. Several times I flicked back through the pages and was surprised to find that an incident which I remembered as pretty significant had only taken a page or so to describe.

I've never read Bowen before, but I would compare her to Chekhov (not least for the way that perspectives of life open out with a visitor to the house, only to narrow again) and Woolf (for the psychological acuteness). ( )