A republication, with a new preface, of Elizabeth Bowen's second
novel which appeared originally in 1929. This, more than any of her
works, has a "deep, clouded spontaneous source" in her own youth in
Ireland during the "troubled times" when guerilla guns reverberated
against a formal tradition which has its direct reflection here.
For it is the succession of tennis parties and dances, teas and
visits which frames and stirs the life within Danielstown, the home
of the Naylors, imperiously and at times imperviously Anglo-Irish
aristocrats whose social snobberies extend as well to the British
officers garrisoned there. Among them is Gerald, who falls in love
with their niece Lois, Lois who is impressionably and wishfully
romantic, anxious to match the absolutism of Gerald's love. And
that "lovely, too mortal month" comes to its close with Gerald's
death, and the burning of the house which is to free Lois for the
future of which she is still so unsure, while for the Naylore there
is only the desolate destruction of a world which is both substance
and symbol... The narrative here is fragmentary- to a point of
fraility: but there is once again the matchless pervasiveness of
place and time as it touches off a private world of expectant
emotion and intimation. (Kirkus Reviews)
The family at the 'big house' is in an equivocal position. Interest and tradition should make them support the British but affection ties them to the now resistant people of the surrounding country. Meanwhile, tennis parties and dances are still held, against a background of ambushes. Young officers dance and flirt, or, armed, they patrol the countryside. Faint vibrations of trouble that she cannot understand reach the young girl Lois, who at the same time takes nothing for granted: she is a child of the transition period. Time is not standing still, and no one really believes that it is. Fate is moving in the direction of this apparently immune and remote place. The young are set to be desolating free, the old desolated, by a violent act.
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