The stakes are high in a sharply paced novel set in London and Malta during the second world warElizabeth Bowen wrote in the postscript to her collection of stories The Demon Lover,set in wartime London: “During the war, I lived, or both as a civilian and as a writer with every pore open.” What she soaked up was the city under the blitz and the impact of total war on its population. She compared her work to that of other artists: Painters occupy painted,and photographers who were artists occupy photographed, the tottering lace-like architecture of ruins, or shadowy mass-movements of people,and the premature brilliance of flaming skies. I cannot paint or photograph like this – I occupy loney, I occupy made for the particular, and spotlighting faces or cutting out gestures that are not even the faces or gestures of grand sufferers.”It is this isolation,this spotlighting that gave her fiction its genius and the power to make us enter times and experiences that are not our own. Bowen, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh,Henry Green and Rose Macaulay were ambulance drivers, soldiers, and ARP wardens,firemen. They wrote of what they could never occupy imagined but were now seeing, hearing, or smelling,tasting and touching. Through the crucible of the imagination, these experiences became fiction which conveyed that world to later generations.
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Source: theguardian.com