Elizabeth Bowen herself remarked that her characters are constantly in transit. Her fictional world, in a way, is one of perpetual motion: people come and go, arrive, visit and depart.
The difficulty for the reader, then, is of discovering some stable point in all this maddening flux. Maud Ellmann, in this latest critical appraisal of Elizabeth Bowen's work, adjudges this disconcerting feature central to the work of an author whose writing exceeds all boundaries, refusing to be easily categorised and conveniently pinned down. She sets herself the task of teasing out what she terms the palpable "strangeness" inherent in Bowen's writing.
While Ellmann's study is not concerned with an exclusive locating of Bowen in relation to Ireland and Irish writing, she does acknowledge that her Anglo-Irishness, her being caught between the poles of England and Ireland, must be at the heart of any attempt to understand her life and her work. The uncertainty and the anxiety that necessarily result from such a precarious position generate unsettling tremors that can be felt reverberating throughout Bowen's fictive and autobiographical writing. Houses and the idea of home are relentlessly being interrogated and challenged in her fiction, as her characters remain unsure of where they belong, of where their loyalties truly lie.
It is not just national identity that is ambivalent, but identity at all levels becomes somewhat fluid, most noticeably sexual identity. Ellmann brilliantly delineates the kinds of relationships that underpin much of Bowen's writing, emphasising how strict gender boundaries are repeatedly being crossed in the novels and short stories. No relationship is ever straightforward in Bowen's work, couples are forever being impinged upon by others: mothers, aunts, awkward teenagers, ghosts and lovers from the past who refuse to stay in the past and who assert themselves in the present.
Ellmann's tracing of the presentation and development of the individual in Bowen's writing is worthwhile and the end result is utterly compelling. Her work emerges from this study as wholly modern. Modern in the sense that she is concerned with excavating modernity itself and how individuals live in the modern world. Human energies are diverted away from each other and into the numerous objects - the bric-a-brac - that clutter up our everyday existence. One particularly compelling insight shows how Bowen fills up her fictional world with "things": the human imagination does not dominate in this world; rather, characters' thoughts are usually rudely interrupted by some intrusion of the actual. A table or chair being bumped into, for instance, brings to an end many would-be philosophical musings, as it brings to an end moments of connection and communication between characters.
Insecurity can also be discerned at the level of language. Bowen's style - especially in some of her Irish novels and short stories - exhibits a knottiness that is hard, at times, to untangle. As Ellmann argues, though, this dramatisation of "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" marks Bowen off from many of her contemporaries and certainly places her in the tradition of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, whose writing is also concerned with this self-conscious struggle into expression. Bowen's writing flirts with the impossibility of containment, in that suppressed emotions and feelings bubble beneath the calm exterior of her prose, threatening to burst upon the page and destroy her narrative flow.
Ellmann has the habit of highlighting instances of similarity between Bowen and numerous other writers: Charles Dickens, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, for example. However, perhaps unintentionally, all this serves to do is underline how entirely unique Bowen's work actually is. It is a body of writing most like itself, rather than anything else.
What comes across powerfully in this study is the contemporariness of Elizabeth Bowen's writing, particularly in an Irish context. Novels such as The Last September and A World of Love, or short stories such as 'The Disinherited' and 'Attractive Modern Homes', still speak to us now. Though they are very much of their time, their treatment of the relationship between the past and the present, the nature of individual agency and the impersonal forces of history, and the precariousness and fragility of our imaginative creations are concerns that haunt us still.
Like that other great Irish writer, W.B. Yeats, Bowen is prepared to declare that her world is passing away and a new world is coming into being. She fears that new world but simultaneously recognises its inevitability. Her image of the Anglo-Irish residing between two worlds, her uncertainty about belonging, mirrors the present-day predicament of an Ireland whose loyalties are inherently confused and an Ireland at a moment of transition.
Maud Ellmann has added to our knowledge of Bowen's abilities as a writer. As with all good works of criticism, she sends us back to the books themselves, to experience at first hand the entertaining and disconcerting fictional world of arrivals and departures. And yet there remains more to be said about Elizabeth Bowen and, undoubtedly, more will be said.
Derek Hand is a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. His book, John Banville: Exploring Fictions, was published last year