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A review by gh7
To the North by Elizabeth Bowen
4.0
This is very much Elizabeth Bowen finding her voice and feet as a novelist. In her first novel, The Hotel, she pilfered and employed, far less successfully, the multiple perspective Virginia Woolf deploys in the second half of The Voyage Out. The identity of Woolf's heroine is thus composed of what various people think about her, which was Woolf's way of exploring the bottomless mystery of identity. Needless to say, Bowen's heroine is far less interesting than Woolf's so as a technique with Bowen it doesn't cut much ice.
To the North shares the same fidgety perspective except, unlike with The Voyage Out, there's no real purpose to it. It's like, for the time being, the only way she knew how to construct a novel was to flit from one perspective to another without having full command of motive. The narrative keeps losing focus, like someone who begins talking without quite knowing what she is going to say. Not surprisingly, the quality of the prose also declines when she's busying herself with characters who have little dramatic purpose. The main characters here are all rough-hewn prototypes of characters Bowen was to create with far more power, artistry and lucidity further down the line - the innocent waif sowing discord, the charming rake who knows no loyalty, the world-weary social butterfly, the interfering sexless older woman, the benign old gent who exudes the comfort of a hot water bottle.
In short, there's a lot of brilliant writing but there's also some overwrought rather vacuous digressions. Better than The Hotel but falls short of her best work. But then she was only thirty-two when she wrote it. It's got an average rating here of 3.69 which I'd say is pretty spot on.
To the North shares the same fidgety perspective except, unlike with The Voyage Out, there's no real purpose to it. It's like, for the time being, the only way she knew how to construct a novel was to flit from one perspective to another without having full command of motive. The narrative keeps losing focus, like someone who begins talking without quite knowing what she is going to say. Not surprisingly, the quality of the prose also declines when she's busying herself with characters who have little dramatic purpose. The main characters here are all rough-hewn prototypes of characters Bowen was to create with far more power, artistry and lucidity further down the line - the innocent waif sowing discord, the charming rake who knows no loyalty, the world-weary social butterfly, the interfering sexless older woman, the benign old gent who exudes the comfort of a hot water bottle.
In short, there's a lot of brilliant writing but there's also some overwrought rather vacuous digressions. Better than The Hotel but falls short of her best work. But then she was only thirty-two when she wrote it. It's got an average rating here of 3.69 which I'd say is pretty spot on.