The Heat of the Day is a novel by Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, first published in 1949.
The Heat of the Day revolves around the relationship between Stella Rodney and her lover Robert Kelway, with the interfering presence of Harrison in the tense years following the Blitz in London. Harrison, a British intelligence agent who is convinced that Robert is a German spy, uses this knowledge to get between the two lovers and ultimately neutralise Robert. Stella finds herself caught between spy and counterspy. The narrative reveals the "inextricable knitting together of the individual and the national, the personal and the political."Bennett and Royle, 92
Plot The novel opens in the midst of World War II, in a London park where a concert is taking place. Present at the concert are Louie, a young woman whose husband is fighting in the war, and Harrison, an English counterspy. Louie attempts to flirt with Harrison, who sternly rebuffs her. After the concert, Harrison goes to the flat rented by Stella Rodney, a middle-aged woman who works for the government. Harrison is in love with Stella and has been pursuing her for years; Stella is in love with another man, Robert Kelway. Harrison now tells Stella of his suspicions that Robert is a spy for the German government. He promises not to report Robert to the government if she leaves Robert to become his lover.
Stella rejects Harrison's offer but considers the possibilities. Her son, Roderick, visits her on leave from his army training. The novel recounts how Roderick had inherited Mount Morris, the Irish estate owned by his father's cousin Francis. An elderly and wealthy man, Francis had died while visiting his wife, Nettie, at a home for the mentally infirm. It was at Francis's funeral that Stella first met Harrison, who claimed to be a friend of Francis.
Stella continues her relationship with Robert, meeting his eccentric family and holding off Harrison. She eventually leaves for Ireland to visit Mount Morris and take care of affairs for Roderick. Her time there reminds her of her youth, when she had been married to Roderick's father; they were later divorced. Stella resolves to ask Robert about Harrison's allegations. In England, Robert denies the accusations, upbraiding Stella for distrusting him. He then proposes that they get married.
Roderick visits his cousin Nettie to learn whether she wants to return to Mount Morris. Nettie displays a surprisingly sound presence of mind, revealing that she has feigned mental illness to live life on her own terms. She also tells Roderick that, contrary to universal belief, Stella had not initiated her divorce. Roderick's father had begun the proceedings after he fell in love with an army nurse. Roderick confronts his mother with this information, to which she responds that everyone has always assumed she was the guilty party. A phone call from Harrison interrupts the conversation, and Stella accepts his dinner invitation to avoid her son.
At dinner, a startled Stella talks with Harrison about her past. She admits that she lied about her role in the divorce to prevent other people from thinking of her as her husband's fool. Harrison reveals that he knows Stella told Robert about him. He tells her that he now has to arrest Robert. Before Stella can respond, Louie notices Harrison and interrupts their conversation. Stella uses the opportunity to indirectly mock Harrison. She seems to hurt his feelings, and when she implicitly offers to have sex with him to prolong Robert's life, he declines.
Robert gradually becomes aware that the government is converging on him. He goes to Stella to confess his lies. He admits that he spies for Nazi Germany, explaining that freedom provides humanity with nothing but an opportunity to destroy itself. Stella is repelled by his beliefs but she loves him too much to abandon him. Robert tells her that he must leave before they learn to hate each other. He kills himself by throwing himself from the roof of Stella's building.
The narrative gives a sweeping overview of the next two years of the war. Roderick decides never to learn more about his father, instead resolving to live peacefully at Mount Morris. Harrison visits Stella again during another bombing, where she seems to let him down gently. He tells her that his first name is Robert; the resolution of their relationship is left ambiguous. Louie gets pregnant in the course of her extramarital affairs but her husband is killed in action without knowing. Louie leaves London to give birth to her son. She retires with him to her home town, with the intent to raise him as if he were her heroic husband's child.
Characters
Main characters
Stella Rodney: Stella is the novel's protagonist, an attractive, sophisticated, and independent woman. She is middle-aged, but is also "young-looking—most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life."Heat of the Day, 23 She works for a government agency called XYD, and the sensitive nature of her job leads her to be guarded. She is not inquisitive because she does not want to answer questions herself. Her patriotism is shaped by the fact that her brothers died serving in World War I. Stella has clear class prejudices, being herself descended from (now un-landed) gentry.
Robert Kelway: Robert is an attractive man in his late thirties who remains in London during the war after being wounded at the Battle of Dunkirk. Robert limps from this wound, but only when he feels "like a wounded man."Heat of the Day, 97 His identity is in constant flux throughout the course of the novel as Stella's investigation of his potential espionage unfolds. Robert's fascist sympathies are due to a combination of his wounding at Dunkirk and his growing up under the rule of his authoritarian mother and the example of his emasculated father.
Harrison: Harrison is a counterspy for England. His eyes are described as being uneven so that he gives the uncanny impression of looking at people with both separate eyes at once, or of looking at them twice. He is a quiet man, and his "emotional idiocy"Heat of the Day, 44 leads him to making uncomfortable and brash statements through the veiled double-speak of spies and counterspies. He sees "no behavior as being apart from motive, and any motive as worth examining twice."Heat of the Day, 7 At the end of the novel, he reveals that his first name is Robert.
Roderick Rodney: Roderick is Stella's son. He is a young soldier but is still in England, training, over the course of most of the novel. Roderick becomes a soldier because that is what young men in his time do, rather than out of any particular patriotic fervor. Stella worries that he is too emotionally distant, and indeed he makes no effort to maintain an emotional relationship with any besides his mother with the exception of his friend Fred, a fellow soldier (who we see only briefly on a train platform near the end of the novel), for whom Roderick demonstrates an almost hero-worshipping devotion.
Louie Lewis: Louie is a twenty-seven-year-old working-class woman looking for a model on which to base her life. She is alone in London: her husband, Tom, is away at war and her parents were killed by a bomb in her hometown of Seale-on-Sea. Flirtatious, flighty, and credulous, Louie is constantly seeking human contact as a means to form her own identity.
Minor characters Connie: Louie's best friend and an avid and suspicious reader of newspapers
Ernestine Kelway: Robert's loquacious and busy widowed sister
Mrs. Kelway ("Muttikins"): Robert's authoritarian mother
Cousin Nettie: Cousin Francis's widow, who pretends to be mad so that she can live in exile at the madhouse Wisteria Lodge rather than return to her late husband's house
Colonel Pole: one of Stella's estranged ex-in-laws, a mourner at Cousin Francis's funeral.
Absent characters Cousin Francis: dead Irishman who bequeathed his ancestral home to Roderick
Fred: Roderick's best friend and fellow soldier (who does appear briefly, described as even taller than Roderick, near the end)
Tom: Louie's husband, off at war through most of the book, dies by the end
Victor: Roderick's father, wounded in World War 1, and then dies, having allegedly left Stella for his nurse
Character parallelisms
Stella and Louie
Stella and Louie are displaced women in London. Louie is from Seale-on-Sea and only came to London to be with her husband who is now away at war. Stella rents her flats and all her furniture, she has no place to call hers, no permanent home, not even any things (all her furniture etc. is in storage somewhere.)
Both are willing to have sex outside their monogamous relationships for monogamy's sake. Louie carries on her adulterous affairs because she feels closer to her husband with any man than she does with no man. Stella ultimately offers herself sexually to Harrison to try and protect the man she actually loves, Robert.
Both are mothers who lie to their sons about the sons' fathers. In both cases, the mother is making the father look better than he is. However, Louie is also making herself look better by claiming that Thomas Victor's father is her husband, whereas Stella is accepting the blame for adultery that she didn't commit in her lie to her son. Whether or not this makes her look worse is a matter of perspective—yes, she looks guilty, but she rejects the role of a victimised wife (which she really is).
Robert and Harrison Both are attracted to Stella, and their simultaneous vying for her person (sexually and psychologically) is central to the plot.
Both are involved in espionage, Robert being a nazi spy and Harrison being a counterspy for England. Furthermore, both are betraying their home country—Robert by spying for Germany, Harrison by trying to buy Stella's sexual favours with his influence as a counterspy.
Harrison has an uneven gaze with his off-balance eyes; Robert has an uneven gait because of his limp.
Both are named Robert.
Neither one has a proper home that we know about, and where they go when they are not with Stella is a mystery. Maud Ellmann argues that this means neither one is a proper "character" by the standards of realism, a deliberate move on Bowen's part.Ellmann, 146
Roderick and Robert Both are men that Stella loves, one as a son and the other as a lover.
They have very similar sounding names—at Cousin Francis's funeral, Colonel Pole accidentally calls Roderick Robert.
Roderick looks "more like himself"Heat of the Day, 49 in Robert's dressing gown.
Robert believes in fascism because he thinks people can't handle freedom. Roderick eagerly accepts his destiny to be a landowner at Mount Morris, and Stella is relieved that her son has such a script laid out for him rather than being free to be nothing.
Cousin Nettie and Robert Both come from houses that affect them negatively: Cousin Nettie from Mount Morris, where generations of Anglo-Irish women went mad or nearly mad, and Robert from Holme Dene, a "man eating house."Heat of the Day, 288
Both live duplicitous lives, Robert as a German spy in London and Cousin Nettie as a sane woman who feigns insanity.
Both are trying to establish gender identities by rejecting certain gender roles. Robert is not honouring his fatherland and running a household, but he tells Stella that being a spy in secret makes him a man again, meaning that he is a man, but only in secret. Cousin Nettie tries and fails to be a proper wife to Francis, and only is able to settle down and establish her own domestic space by feigning madness and leaving her married house for good.
Main themes
Time