Book Review: "Friends and Relations" by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was known as one of the great female writers of the modern era. Personally, I have loved her books "The Death of the Heart" and "The House in Paris" for their incredible depictions of the human conditions that are far superior to the writings of authors like Edith Wharton. Bowen is often underrated and her books under-read, he characters are under-appreciated and her concepts lack a more modern understanding. I am sure that if you were however, to read the two previous novels mentioned, you would find that Elizabeth Bowen has a much greater charm for the nature of human relationships than many other female writers of her day.

This book by Elizabeth Bowen however, is not like her others very much. Yes, it has a similar writing style and yes, the plot is somewhat similar in the types of characters it involves. But the lacking in depth is something I have not been able to justify. There is a severe lack of meaning to this book, something which is not seen in the novel "The House in Paris" which is far superior to this one. There is something almost juvenile about the way in which everything is sruface layer rather than put forward in classic extended metaphors, similes, irony and satire of the class. I feel like the writing style itself, though not incredibly bad, was compromised somewhat for the sake of the amount of characters and relations going on within the book.

Let us now take a look at a few quotations that demonstrate that though the book is filled with pretty and valuable language to plot and theme - there really is not much to be said about depth:

"Tall mirrors prolonged her little drawing-room in false perspectives; in her life as in her drawing-room an acquaintance losing the sense of direction hardly knew which way to proceed. She puts down a saucer of milk for the Siamese, which dropped to it like a plummet from the sofa-back startling Janet."

There is something incredibly quaint and nice about this quotation. The only thing I have difficulty with is whatever deeper meaning there was has been ultimately given away in the most obvious ways possible. It doesn't seem like that there is anything for the reader to figure out since the quotation itself has given away all the clues. That cannot though be said for the entirety of the novel.

"The cold mounting excitement under her manner communicated itself to Edward and, like fever, effected a disembodiment. So that his thought, detaching itself from the self in anguish, ranged with delirious boldness; hardly thought at all, detached from feeling. And as when in fever the freed, weightless thought going down street after street or penetrating a forest, halts, finds one house or one tree, and fuses with this utterly becoming the house or the tree past hope of escape, Edward's thoughts stopped and flared at a point where dread and desire ran round the circle to meet."

As we can see there is an imbalance in to what the language of the novel is trying to convey to the reader. For this reason, I did not find it as welcoming and arranged as some of Bowen’s other novels. However, seeing as her other novels demonstrate her strength in the composition of the novel and its language - I could not possibly downgrade this any further since it seems like simply the weaker of her bibliography. I have nothing more to add except for the fact that this is not the book you would want to start on if you were beginning your reading journey into Elizabeth Bowen.