John Bowen (1) (1924–2019)

A little gem. This dark comedy of manners and mores from 1988 scores for me on three important points: first, it is beautifully written. NOT flowery and poetic, heaven help us, no, but wonderful plain-spoken descriptions and observations that, in the tradition of the best writing, mean that the thing described or observed can never be seen in quite the same way again. Bowen's descriptions, and catalogues, of the content of an English country garden are so beautiful it made me want to get show more straight to a garden center. His description of a rather old, poorly constructed and over-taxed septic tank at the bottom of that idyllic garden was so detailed and rigorous that I shudder to think about the research he must have done. And as a former teacher of creative writing, I marvelled at the clever and apt use of the omniscient voice, and the story structure that lulls the readers into a sense of complacency, like dozing in a deck chair in that lovely garden on a warm summer's afternoon, only to shock you out of that complacency like being slapped by a cold, dead hand.[return][return]Because second, it is dark. Dark, dark, dark. And hilarious. I am doing my best to avoid spoilers here, but trust me, when I say that when the action starts, it is not for the faint-hearted. This is "Mapp and Lucia", directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in his "Psycho" years. [return][return]And yet ... third, it is incredibly touching and even life-affirming. "The Heart wants what it wants ..." but with all due respect to Emily Dickinson, John Bowen's little gem of a novel demonstrates that it cares very much indeed. show less

Maybe 3.5?

Horrifying acts of violence in the same sentence (I think, at least in the same paragraph), as descriptions of the various lovely flora of the English countryside. And I may never look at a craft fair the same way again.

So that much was interesting, but the ending just didn't do it for me. Maybe not 3.5.

A short novel, which is hard to classify, John Bowen's "After the rain". For sure, it is a science-fiction novel, starting as it does with rain causing a flood, which destroys human civilisation up till then. The narrative voice makes the book sound a lot like work, for instance, by John Wyndham's "The Kraken wakes".

Stylistically, the book is somewhat unbalanced. The first five chapters are in many ways so ironic, that it seems the writer did not take himself or his work very seriously. show more Subsequent chapters have more and dramatically convincing action, which pulls the reader in, but in the final three chapters the novel becomes very philosophical, first concentrating on the character's problems, and finally settling on religion. In this way the book also foreshadows Golding's "The Lord of the Flies".

The similarity to other writer's work, and the lack of stylistic balance make the book hardly qualify as great literature. On the other hand, I would definitely not put the book together with pulp fiction, as has been suggested by other reviewers. First published in 1958, one can hardly call the book an experiment in the genre. Perhaps, the short novel, only 144 pages, could best be described as a personal experiment, of the author. Interesting. show less

This was OK. I don't know if it makes any sense to tell the story from the point of view of the pigeon, but the author did a good job of creating a whole vision of pigeon-hood.