I won't Stay in a World without Love

A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen

This 1954 novel is an Anglo-Irish novel, like J.G. Farrell’s Troubles. Both novels examine how the Anglo-Irish experienced WWI as a source of trauma.

The action occurs in Montefort, the country house of the Danbys. Such is its decay – they are farmers too poor to keep it up - when a stranger drives up to the house he says, “No idea there was anyone living here… .”

For the small mansion had the air of having gone down: for one thing, trees had been felled around it, leaving space impoverished and the long roofline framed by too much sky. The door no longer knew hospitality; moss obliterated the sweep for the turning carriage; the avenue lived on as a rutted track, and a poor fence, close up to the house, served to keep back grazing cattle. Had the facade not carried a ghost of style, Montefort would have looked, as it almost did, like nothing more than the annexe of its farm buildings… .

Like Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, the rural setting is a dream world full of colors, smells, sensations and landscapes that glisten with the mists of fantasy, like a fairy tale.

The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of one house, and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world--painted expectant, empty, intense. This month was June… .

This novel has five living characters, a ghost, and the thirteen-year-old Maud has a familiar named Gay David. The ghost of Montefort's former owner, who was killed in the First World War, symbolizes the past –dispossession, destructive wars - that haunts The Emerald Isle, as it decides what its role is going to be after WWII. Maud’s pixie is an ironic counterpart to the ghost. I don't know anything about child development, but isn't 13 too old to have an imaginary friend?

The characters are vivid enough as they live in a house that has no clocks. To ground herself in her family’s free-floating existence, Maud obsesses about listening to the chimes of Big Ben on the Beeb at 9:00 p.m. But Bowen is not a modernist that doesn’t know what her characters are doing to do. Her characters are puppets that Bowen skillfully moves across the stage. Also cagey like a modernist should be, Bowen’s story revolves around old letters found in a trunk in the attic, but Bowen never reveals the sender or receiver.

A solid novel, a short introduction to Bowen before one turns to heavier fare such as The Heat of the Day or The Death of the Heart.