I was a little disappointed in this book having recently finished The Death of the Heart which I really liked. The strands of the narrative seemed disjointed to me - the son's inheritance, the cousin's death, the spy thread, the girl Louie. There was a link in that many situations things were not as they seemed or became other than what was expected.
Also, the ending was strange because lots of things happened together as if the writer had to fasten it all quickly while the pace of most of the book is very languid. For me there were a lot of dangling ends which of course was probably intended and meant to reflect the chaos of the times but I did find it frustrating.
Having recently read the book of letters which passed between Bowen and her married lover Charles Ritchie, it looks as if a lot of her conflicts with her personal situation may be reflected in this book.
Bowen has wonderful gifts of expression, finding significance in apparently minor points, creating characters than are very real but the ability to weave a coherent story is missing. ( )

The Heat of Day offers a terrific conflict--a woman is told that her lover is selling war secrets to the enemy and to protect her lover she must agree to be the companion of the rather unseemly blackmailer. If only Ms. Bowen's writing were equal to her intriguing idea. The narrative and structure of The Heat of the Day continually fall in an out of focus, making parts of this novel fascinatingly slick while other parts of the prose drudgingly laborious. This is my second unsatisfactory encounter with Ms Bowen that has again led me to suspect that she is a good writer who writes bad books. ( )

A few months ago I read The Last September, by the same author, and was blown away - I'd barely heard of her before, and I found myself wondering why I ever read any books that were less good.

The Heat Of The Day, however, was more of a slow burner for me. Partly this is because less happens - partly because the structure of the narrative is harder to figure out - and partly because the moral and emotional issues in the book are more dated. (One of the things which made The Last September so amazing for me was the psychological acuity about a young woman awkwardly coming of age - but it's a lot harder for me to judge whether this book is an accurate portrayal of what it feels like when you are told your lover is a spy.)

That said, there were some things I really liked about the book - for example, the way the first few chapters established the sense that because of the war, everyone had lost their roots - their traditions - and even their selves. By the end of the book I had decided that the apparent lack of structure might be deliberate - to convey the lack of grounding in people's lives during the war. ( )

Elizabeth Bowen is a very good writer with a propensity for writing about unlikable characters. There are some passages in "The Heat of the Day" that get at the heart of an experience the way that Woolf and Proust do, allowing you to see beauty in what seems to be a common occurrence. Then there are others, usually during dialogue, where Bowen's ethereal style seems to get away from her, and it's almost like she's just writing to herself. Of course, the plot here is negligible: my copy has a blurb on the cover saying it's like "a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf", but it's definitely more Woolf than Greene, with all of the "thrills" coming from the uncertainty inherent in human relationships. Overall, it's a good book with some great bits sprinkled throughout, but it was just slightly off the mark somehow. This is the second book by Bowen I've read and I've had mixed feelings about both, but there's enough potential greatness in her writing to make me want to keep reading her. ( )

Astonishingly good. ( )