I know Elizabeth Bowen is much loved by people whose tastes I respect. And I get it: her prose is fine-tuned and precise, every single word with a purpose and place. Similarly, her observations are razor sharp—capable of drawing blood.

But while I’m sure I’d love Bowen in small doses—i.e. short stories—at novel length, I found her refined style exhausting. And even then, I might have immersed myself in Bowen’s prose if not for the fact that The Death of the Heart is populated with a group of pompous, snobbish and self-obsessed individuals, none of whom you’d willingly spend time with. Not even at gunpoint.

Sadly, Portia doesn’t have a choice. With her father, and more recently her mother, dead, she’s become the ward of her stepbrother Thomas and his wife Anna. We hear the whole story from Anna in the opening chapter, moaning to her friend, St. Quentin. She fills him in on Thomas’s father’s tawdry affair with Portia’s mother and the burden of being lumped with a girl so lacking in wit and charm. As for Portia, she wishes she was anywhere else. All she has keeping her moderately sane is the no-nonsense maid Matchett—who has looked after Portia all her life —and Portia’s bestie Lillian. Enter Eddie. A cad. A philanderer. And a friend of Anna’s (they kissed once) who now works for Thomas’s advertising firm. He takes a liking to Portia. She takes a liking to Eddie. It goes downhill from there.

I appreciate that I’m not meant to like Anna, Eddie, Thomas, St. Quentin and Dickie or Daphne (the latter two the stepchildren of Anna’s old Governess, Mrs Heccombe). I also understand that Portia’s innocence—but also the baggage of her parent’s affair—brings out a cruelty, a dismissiveness, in those around her, especially Anna. (It’s likely that Anna sees an aspect of herself in Portia and doesn’t like it).I also appreciate that this notion of “likeable” characters has whiskers on it, an insidious way of silencing angry, passionate, righteous voices. But Bowen’s prose is so exacting, so well observed, that I always felt at arm’s length. 

I didn’t put the novel down because I finish everything I start (silly me) and because Bowen’s dialogue is often brilliant. Moreso than her authorial voice, she’s able to show the cracks in civility, the flaws in Anna and Thomas’s marriage, the vastly out-of-whack power dynamic between Eddie and Portia, the fact everyone thinks Major Brutt is pathetic but won’t tell him to his face. Then there’s Daphne. We meet her when Portia is sent to the seaside during Spring (Thomas and Anna head to Capri; given their loveless marriage, I can only imagine what fun that was). Her bitchiness (she wouldn’t be out of place in Saltburn) adds a much-needed spark to the novel. I didn’t like Daphne, but I understood her.

The ending, though, is terrific. It’s almost worth the slog just for the heated conversation between Thomas and Anna in the final chapter, where some truths (not all, but some) are finally laid bare.

I get it. I understand why Bowen is adored and why this book, in particular, is loved. It just didn’t work for me.