A recent letter of his asked if she was being a good girl and, well, sometimes she is. But, in the end, she could be any young wife left alone in London by a husband away in the army. The woman, in contrast, is described in detail and her life is neatly packaged up for us over several pages. We find out far more about her than we do about the man, which turns out to be a kind of signal from the author to the reader: Harrison, as we later discover him to be called, is hard to pin down. We’re in Regent’s Park in wartime – it’s 1942 – and a man, deep in thought on one of the chairs in the open-air auditorium, catches the notice of a woman nearby. Right from the beginning I was trying to get a fix on the class of these people. (Chapter 4 is a flashback, and I’ll come to it later.)
It’s not exactly exhausting, but it takes Bowen 60-odd pages to take us through a single evening in September. The point of view slips easily between the two speakers involved in each encounter, so that Bowen gives us an almost impossibly nuanced picture not only of each character, but of what the other character thinks of him or her. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a single encounter or meeting, with every word of the conversation not only presented as direct speech, but almost endlessly gauged and re-appraised by the listener for subtleties of meaning. I don’t think this 1949 novel could have existed had it not been for the stream-of-consciousness narratives of the 20s.
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