Eva Trout

by Elizabeth Bowen

Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel, epitomizes her bold exploration of the territory between the comedy of manners and cutting social commentary.

Orphaned at a young age, Eva has found a home of sorts in Worcestershire with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles, and Iseult's husband, Eric. From a safe distance in London, her legal guardian, Constantine, assumes that all's well. But Eva's flighty, romantic nature hasn't entirely clicked with the Arbles household, and Eva is plotting to escape. When she sets out to hock her Jaguar and disappear without a trace, she unwittingly leaves a paper trail for her various custodians–and all kinds of trouble–to follow.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Ireland, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, British Literature

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Objectively this is probably a four star book but I’m going the full hog because of how much relentless pleasure it gave me, not least of all because of its laugh-out-loud humour and original and wholly compelling cast of characters. It took Elizabeth Bowen a long time, until her last two books, to try her hand at a full blown comic novel and boy does she do it well. (The inept introduction makes the extraordinary claim that in this novel Bowen abandons comedy.)

Eva Trout, an orphaned heiress, cannot find her feet in the world. She’s a familiar Bowen heroine, the bluster of her unschooled innocence creating havoc wherever she goes. Few writers do children better than Bowen and this is again the case here. She gets that wondrous x-ray tilt children put on things. Iseult, her former teacher, is a fabulous portrait of the disillusioned clever woman who has married beneath herself and Constantine, her lawful guardian, is one of Bowen’s best ever creations.

It’s purposely overwritten (see the quote below about a day in Cambridge) but in a mischievous and consistently mannered way which wages its own private war on cliché. Bowen, you can tell, hates clichés and often mocks them by turning them on their head or inserting them into a sentence or passage which is grammatically bizarre. “But absence,” he wheedled, “makes the heart grow fonder. It’s completely unheard of that it should fail to.” There’s barely a sentence in this novel anyone else could have written – with, maybe, the exception of late Henry James who she pays homage to with her contorted sentence structures. Fitting that the leading male is called Henry.

On a social level the novel can be read as a depiction of England’s uneasy transition from the pastoral into modernity– there’s the village vicarage which becomes a kind of foundation stone for Eva and contains in atmosphere the inexpensive reassurances of the 19th century; this is counterpointed by the sexually predatory charlatan Constantine (Eva’s dead father’s lover) in his high rise office who, though super rich, has no job title. Eva herself finds sanctuary in the vicarage until the inevitable expulsion. She then fills her new home with all the inventions of modernity. The old world priest is replaced by a succession of faith healers, art therapists and new age ministers. When these fail her she is drawn back to the past which takes the form of a visit to the National Portrait Gallery where she goes from the Tudors to the Stuarts through to the Victorians in an effort to find out how much identity can be found in a face. Not much, she concludes, still trying to find her own face.

My love for this book was further increased by my familiarity with its settings – fantastic evocations of Paris and especially London which enabled me to see the familiar anew; and the description of Chicago where she goes to buy a child on the black market reminded me of my own trip there as a child when I felt the full force of its aggressive insistence on the future, its alienating and dwarfing rejection of every yesterday.

The novel also pays lip service to psychoanalytic ideas of its time, which act as a kind of hidden floorplan. The child Eva buys is a deaf mute which offers Bowen exuberant opportunity to explore the world of alternative healing. Every relationship here is subjected to a psychological autopsy. We seem decades further up the line from Virginia Woolf when in fact only twenty years have transpired. Bowen is confronting modernity with a razor sharp eye for satiric detail, but without the wistful sentimentalised nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited, and a hair-triggered sensibility alert to both the beauty and absurdity of the worlds in which Eva finds herself. One of the things that makes this so fascinating is that it’s the work of a writer precipitated out of her own era into a new one – the 1960s. She’s as tenderly affectionate as she is scathingly mocking and it was this subtle and difficult tightrope act that helped make this novel so loveable, that and its high tide imaginative vitality, awesomely impressive for a seventy year old woman.

[Fionnuala]

I finished this book weeks ago, and what I now remember is that while I was reading it, I kept seeing a kaleidoscope in my mind's eye. As I turned the pages, there seemed to be more and more fractured images. So many things in this book are broken, the characters, the syntax, and even the narrative itself. But each broken thing is nevertheless beautiful, just as the fractured images revealed when we look into a kaleidoscope are beautiful. And, by the end of the book, all the broken elements had merged to make something truly impressive. That's how I will remember this book.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The latest historic Booker shortlist project at The Mookse and The Gripes has reached 1970. Of the six, this was the one I was most looking forward to, as I have heard good things about Bowen but never read her. This was her last novel.

This book is a quirky dark comedy - it may be named for its central character but it is really more of an ensemble piece in which other characters are given plenty of breathing space. The language is often startling - Bowen employs rather odd sentence structures and often inverts or subverts cliches. This is never too difficult to follow, despite the occasional intrusion of arcane vocabulary. The story often seems to inhabit an older time period than its setting in the late 50s and early 60s. The way the story is structured seems uneven - the first part of the book has 12 chapters, most of them short, and the second part just has 4, including a final chapter running to over 60 pages.

At the heart of the story is Eva Trout, a young heiress on the verge of inheriting a large fortune. Eva is a spoiled child formed by parental neglect, and also something of a fantasist, and at the start of the book we find her temporarily lodged with her favourite teacher Iseult and her husband Eric in Worcestershire, with the agreement of Constantine, her guardian who was also her father's former partner. At the start of the book she is a few months short of the age at which she is due to inherit.

Eva's mother died in a plane crash when she was an infant, and her rich father, though indulgent, has not spent enough time with her, farming her out to some eccentric schools, the first of which is a pet project of Constantine, who owns a decaying castle where he has installed a friend as a head teacher. This school comes to an end after an incident in which Eva's room-mate almost drowns in its lake. The first few chapters tell this part of the story in a series of flashbacks.

Eva senses that she is making Iseult and her husband uncomfortable, and spends most of her time in the neighbouring vicarage among its four children. She persuades one of them, Henry, to help her sell her Jaguar to fund a secret escape to a decaying and impractical house on the Kent coast - the chapter in which she arrives at the house portrays her as a comic caricature with no common sense and no idea how to look after herself. Her trail is soon discovered thanks to correspondence carelessly left in Iseult's house and she is visited by Iseult's husband Eric, and then Constantine, who finds them. In the remainder of the first part she acquires the inheritance and flees to America.

The second part of the book is stranger. While in America, Eva has acquired a deaf mute child Jeremy, in mysterious circumstances. They return to England and the same circle, and Eva manages to create further confusion wherever she goes. She embarks on a strange semi-romance with Henry and hatches a plot to stage an apparent departure with him for a wedding overseas. This forms the ending of the book. Iseult, now estranged from Eric, has acquired his revolver, and deposited it among Eva's belongings at her London hotel while she is with France with Jeremy, and like Chekhov's gun, this inevitably forms part of the ending, which may surprise some readers.

I found the book an interesting and entertaining read, but I was left wondering what the point of it all was, beyond some rather superficial observations about the value of parental influence and education.

I don't think 1970 was a strong year for the Booker - so far this is the best of the three I have read, the others being the winner The Elected Member and Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream. I would still be interested in reading more Bowen.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly a challenging and engagingly original work of fiction. Madame Bowen is a commanding and angry writer, defying stereotypes and blatantly and stubbornly defends human ambiguities with gross exaggerations that one is left to nod in agreement: We're all weird, and I'm weird.

Eva Trout is a largely compelling work that paints a portrait of a woman who represents “the other” or shall we say, a person who is not of the norm, according to the hypocritical and largely judgmental eyes of the conservative hypocrite characters in which she is surrounded with.

At the first glance she seems to blissfully ignore her conservative peers by willfully behaving in audacious ways that seems to purposefully shock others. However, as her tragedy unfolds, we learn that it is not all her fault for being the way she is.

Firstly, she is the product of bizarre and absent parenting, thanks to the oddities and sins of the flesh that her Uncle Constantine and father Willy engage in, through debauchery, and overt lust, “the entire cut of the jib of Eva’s father could have given the lie to that obsession; which had, in fact, waited to mark him down till he was into what seemed maturity”(Bowen 10).

Willy Trout and Uncle Constantine, his lover are too busy spending time with another, so poor Miss Eva gets ignored a whole lot; representing what many “poor little” rich girls went through.

The trauma of not knowing what is “right” or “wrong” in the ways acting in polite society plague Eva throughout the novel as well, and serves as part of her downfall and why predatory characters who loathe themselves tended to use her as a scapegoat for their own problems.

Though written in 1970, it feels like a novel written in the 1930s, but very stylistic of Modernist style that Elizabeth Bowen had been influenced by with her titanic peers: Mansfield, Joyce, Rhys and Woolf.

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

You could hardly ever go wrong with heroine-titled tomes; books like “Olive Kitteridge,” “Madame Bovary,” “Elizabeth Costello,” "Emma," etc. But for the first time I was somewhat disappointed when I chose another, at random, to read (this tactic had been generally foolproof before, see). Eva, our main character, seems disjointed from her own time and place—she is mysterious yet languid; passionate though very passive—in all, still very much adhering to the ol’ Victorian values we’ve all come to love. Why does everyone feel so strange around her? Men start becoming misogynists, women become overly jealous. What’s her deal? By the end, you are entrapped & curious enough to want to know, but the no-plot-to-speak-of honestly disappoints. I really dig Bowen’s prose, though, despite the tepid story—her short snappy sentences infused with the token “flower bouquet in the summer garden near the tea set” ones are quite incredible!

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I’m being a little harsh here, but I was left thinking that Eva Trout is a revolting novel and it would be a good thing if no one ever read it except students specializing in revolting novels.
So why not fling it robustly against the Wall of Detested Books after the requisite 50 pages and pen a curt squib, render a 1 star rating, and leave it at that? Because…. The first half, maybe even two thirds, are really almost very good. And then comes the horror, the horror.

THE BETTER FOR BEING HAD OUT

Elizabeth Bowen has a fabulous ornate way with the English language – she never calls a spade a spade, no, in the land of Bowen a spade would be an occasionally essential device of edged arboreal application. She is the high priestess of arch, which the dictionary defines as Deliberately or affectedly playful and teasing, knowing, clever, mischievous. So this is a novel with one eyebrow permanently raised, and I was swinging along gleefully with old lady Bowen (this was written at age 69) having almost successfully forgotten about my disastrous-first-date encounter with young coquette Bowen (The Last September, written at age 29). I was so happy…. Ah. Those were the days. These are the sort of things I liked:

“She abandoned me. She betrayed me.”
“Had you a Sapphic relationship?”
“What?”
“Did you exchange embraces of any kind?”
“No. She was always in a hurry.”

*

(A father is speaking to his son. He suspects the son is having romantic difficulties.)

“There is not by any chance anything that had better be had out, is there?”
“I don’t think anything’s the better for being had out.”

*

From a letter written to Eva by a guy she meets on a plane:

Bring into being that which was not, one can. Bring into being that which of its own volition proceeds onward from what when brought into being it first was, one cannot. You have the better of me.

(This has to be a parody of Henry James!)

CHOCOLATE COVERED TARANTULAS

The story is all about a young ungainly physically outsized socially awkward orphaned heiress living life on her own weird terms. What gradually becomes revolting is that no one in this book ever behaves or talks like a normal person. Well, what’s so bad about that – could say the same about all of Shakespeare and all of PG Wodehouse and all of Raymond Chandler – nothing wrong with artificial fictional universes. But as the comedy began to disintegrate, as the laughter curdled in the epiglottis Eva Trout - the character and the book - just seemed vicious and the sparkly box of bonbons contained nothing but chocolate covered tarantulas.

Eva acquires a child half way through the book. Acquires? Yes, never explained. She goes to America and returns with a deaf mute 8 year old boy. Well, I guess these days every other celeb will do the same in Tanzania or Cambodia. But in 1968? Anyway, to try to apply common sense to what the characters do in this book would be fruitless. Frinstance, the kid never learns sign language, nor does she, so I think the kid is just some giant symbol of The Impossibility of Human Communication; but then we get pages and pages about what the kid does, likes, didn’t do, didn’t like. Who cares what toys a Symbol plays with.

WHO IS ASKING THIS?

She likes to pepper her paragraphs with questions.

He was in good condition. Celerity, though its use was indolent, characterized his movements. He would be fifty?

She picked up her cape from the floor and huddled it round her, over the wispy black dress – also out of an acting box?

A dangling spray of laburnum trailed over Eva’s head; she reached up and angrily snapped off the budding thing. A trifle on edge?

His countenance was set off by the genuine shell rims of his spectacles. The lenses were convex : blind as a mole without them?

I’m inclined to say – well, you made up this stuff - don’t YOU know?

SPEAKING FRENCH IS PREFERRED

Because Miss Bowen will throw in random French words, because the million English words at her disposal were just so imprecise, dwarlings

The pullovers seldom came off, for the girls were frileuses and this was an English summer.

To be so completely bouleversee made me half angry

THE KIND OF SENTENCE YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED FOR

(Henry is telling Eva about his university experiences).

She was far from the milieu which gave any of these context. They related to Cambridge, being inextricable from his present status, which was given still greater power to hag-ride him by his too well knowing it to be but too temporary.

(You like that kind of stuff? There’s plenty more where that came from)

FINALLY AN HONEST ADMISSION

I see that even though this was shortlisted for the Booker, Bowen fans were holding their heads and moaning at their fave author’s disastrous collapse into mannered incomprehensibility. Eva Trout makes no sense at all. It’s an over-wrought shaggy dog story. In the end somebody shoots somebody, and quite right too. If only they’d done that on page 180 I may have given this book 4 stars. On p 266 we read this :

Seriously, Eva, I hate to say so but really you are quite dotty; you’re raving dotty.

Let me adapt that one slightly :

Seriously, Elizabeth Bowen, I hate to say so but really you are quite dotty; you’re raving dotty.

[Georgina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. You could say Eva Trout deals with the enforced silence of women, which sets about a breakdown in communication in the larger social world. The prose is fragmented, forever cracking under some underground strain, like earth pressured by moving roots. Eva Trout is a rich untamed heiress and a perennial liar. She’s like a grown up version of Portia in The Death of the Heart – an innocent soul who wreaks havoc in the world around her. The novel features several truly brilliant complex characters. Eva acting like a kind of truth serum on all of them and unleashing deeply grounded truths of their buried inner lives. Betrayal is a constant theme. And Eva’s quest to find a home leads her to adopt, illegally, a boy child who turns out to be deaf and mute. The novel constantly hints at fatal breakdowns in communication and in Jeremy, the mute child, finds its full expression.

I suspect whether or not you like this novel will depend to a large extent on how you react to the extremely mannered prose style. I loved it.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my main reasons for reading is... Fuck, I was gonna write "understanding" but that's not really it. (For one thing, I don't.) I was hooked on Elizabeth Bowen from the start because she puts into words the expressions I only get in visuals (and sometimes I gotta try them on myself to see what they feel like. I'm a social retard. I've never mastered the "default expression"). Sinister shadows, meanings in protracted sighs, shit that goes over your head but you can still sense it was probably pretty fucking bitchy (Mean Girls the film is factual events). Emotions as events and feeling the marks. Bowen is probably not an author for those who don't watch other people for cues. She's the perfect author for shy people, I think, or analysers.
Not "comedy of manners" shit. Back in the day, when I checked out all Bowen's works from the public library, they ALL had "comedy of manners" on the back cover. That used to be my "Hell no!" indicator. It's lucky I read The Last September first or I'd have missed out. This isn't Seinfeld. ("Where are all the trout? What is the deal!?") Yeah, I guess her books could be taken that way. Well, not comedy. It's like those unspoken rules, how to behave. That's bullshit. I'd go back over my mind what I could possibly have done to avoid this, that and the other and would come up with "Absolutely nothing" (without total avoidance. That's not a bad idea...). It's really about cruelty and excuses for cruelty. Manners are a lie. There isn't a set of rules that gets you out of shit. Don Draper might be on to something about the 40% who pretend to see things the same way, though. Navigating ones way through the land sharks and sea sharks is a more personal thing than that. I loved Bowen's writing because it was those clues that I looked for in life, in words and unspoken words. The tight rope of personal interactions. Knowing when to cut and run when you seemed to have missed the day everybody else was handed the rules. I'm interested in learning how the hell you cultivate some way of understanding what the hell people are talking about, anyway. Joanna Newsom sang "And I have read the write book to interpret your look". That was great. That's what I'm trying to do, I guess.
Eva Trout was not my favorite (that is The Death of the Heart, without reservations). I didn't feel the whole picture. Ultimately the senses I got in the moment were only fleeting. This didn't go down in my heart as a favorite. My twin didn't like it that much. I might be remembering this wrong (sorry, Lauren!) that she found Eva to be annoying. I didn't. She was out of place. I could relate, if I'm different. I like it, I remember thinking different times "Man, Bowen is a genius". She got the differentness, and out of sorts, and rubbing the wrong ways. The ending of "Death" knocked my socks off. Doing "the right thing" (I want that). I have no idea whatsoever what that would be. I don't even know what I'd do once I was more equipped. It probably feel nice to be more at ease. I want to feel more like not being the fish (trout!) out of water more often. Bowen is pretty awesome for that. I'm sorry that I haven't written more about Eva Trout itself. I'm struggling to remember a book I read nearly ten years ago, and I'm struggling to express feelings I didn't entirely understand the first time around. I can't give examples because I do not own my copy. (Wait, this book only has two reviews anyway. Probably no one cares. It's forgotten.) I don't know if I was being an idiot and felt unfulfilled because of the story itself. Probably that (which one? What? Um... Never mind). I think I lost that connection I was riding. Eva's life wasn't one I'd wanna go the distance for. Most people aren't, though. It's weird. I like that I'll most likely only know everyone I know for a short while, and it is also depressing. I don't think I was depressed to leave Eva. That's probably why I remember this as a four star reading experience.
I don't really read to understand all that much. I read in hopes I'll find someone I wanna go the distance with. D'oh! Changing Scenes. If I were a tricked up reviewer writing for a glossy publication, I'd give this some kind of a "Changing scenes" title. Maybe with a photo spread of a trout swimming.
So I'm looking on amazon (product placement alert!) and I find this cd by artist Eva Trout. Real name? Or is this a classic rock attempt in the vein of Steppenwolf, Uriah Heep, Titus Groan, etc? There are samples but I'm not gonna listen to them because this is from the '90s. I don't feel like being reminded of the '90s.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first impression was that Elizabeth Bowen must have attended some sort of author's fair where they sold punctuation. Commas must have been selling for a very good price or the salesman was especially attractive or some other attraction for them that I haven't discerned.

Once alone, Mrs. Dancey, who already had a crick in her neck, saw no further need to study the castle. Instead, here was an unprecedented opportunity to study Eva, at length and in peace, from a safe distance. Eva, one saw straight ahead, through the windscreen.

I had to read that last sentence three times before it made sense. I have read Bowen before, and I didn't remember that her prose was this unusual. I believe that her style in this was intended to convey how unsettled Eva was, how uncomfortable she was in any type of social situation. Although very nearly 25 when the novel opens, she had not had much contact with others of her own age and for years had contact only with foreign nationals. The prose here creates tension in the reader in a different way than that of other authors I've read. As the novel progresses, the prose becomes a bit more even and relaxed, and we see that Eva has also.

I had a conversation recently with another reader about what he likes best about reading. "A good story is essential, anything more is icing." About 2/3 of the way through this I thought perhaps this was a lot of icing with only a so-so story. I felt with all of that awkward prose that there was more to read between the lines than I had energy for. There was definitely enough story to have me keep reading - it never occurred to me to set it aside. I wanted to know Eva, I wanted to know what she would do with her life, I wanted to know what those supporting characters would do and how they would react to Eva as she matured. And, while the story grew on me, it is still a lot of icing.

This has, perhaps, one of the most dramatic endings I've read in quite awhile. In fact, I cannot think of a single novel that has such drama, such a climax, in the last two sentences. It took my breath away. It begs for a sequel. There is no sequel, even if Bowen had considered such. This is Bowen's last novel.

I may have borrowed some of Bowen's unused commas to write this, supposing she had a few extra lying around. As the book gets better as it marches to that dramatic ending, my opinion got better along with it. Is this truly 5-stars? Maybe, maybe not, but that's my rating and I'm sticking to it.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eva Trout is Bowen’s last novel and is written in an unusual style that made me concentrate on the words. The main character, Eva, is herself a bit strange. She’s an heiress, tall and awkward, and not all that likeable. I found myself drawn into this story although the ending was unexpected!

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

10 out of 10





Eva Trout is a mesmerizing, brilliant, puzzling, complex, superbly written roman a clef with multiple layers, thought provoking and inciting readers to decipher reasons, grasp mysteries, with a larger than life main character, Eva Trout, reminding the under signed of the magnificent masterpieces that the author has enchanted yours truly with…The Death of the Heart http://realini.blogspot.com/2012/08/t... and The Heat of the Day http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/12/t...



Eva Trout is probably representing not just one woman, or a ‘type’, because she appears to be so ‘comprehensive’, vast in her difficult to understand character that this reader was thinking she also has traits from a man and thus could be close to the archetype of a ‘human being’, haunted by her past, abandoned by a mother that would die in a plane crash over the Andes, living with a father that is either gay or bisexual, if we are to guess from the intimacy he has had with Constantine Ormeau – the guardian of the heroine once the father is also dead – for the early part of her life, unless she is off with governesses or at the chateau where an attempt to educate her is made, a failed one, followed by the school where she meets the other key personage of the narrative, the teacher who was then Iseult Smith and the became Mrs. Arble, married to Eric Arble and the one who would be selected as a host for Eva.

The protagonist has fallen in love with her teacher – albeit it is not clear if and to what extent this is a lesbian attraction – and her guardian decides to have her stay with the Arbles, at Larkins, where a outré ménage a trois develops – the hosts have problems with money and the arrival of a paying guest is welcome from this point of view, but on moral, emotional grounds, the presence will extract such a toll that it would be hard to assess the benefits over the losses – and the result is a tense situation, made fantastically captivating by the fabulous Elizabeth Bowen, who writes with a phenomenal talent, simple to grasp and yet as sophisticated and elaborate, elevated as the best writers we can think of…the under signed has been unable to deal with Ulysses – James Joyce, though Homer is not easily accessible too – and thought the magnum opus hermetic and beyond his means, but Eva Trout is not the prose of Albert Camus either and we have the exquisite pleasure to find wondrous words – elatingness – and expressions…’illumined innocence, I have lived through books, I have lived internally…’



Eva is twenty four in the beginning of the narrative, but only a few months from twenty five, the age when she comes into the opulent inheritance left by her father, Willy Trout, and supervised by Constantine Ormeau, involved in a close, but bizarre relationship with the family of the vicar from near Larkins, especially with the his son, Henry Dancey, who is half Eva’s age in the first chapters, when she would ask him to help her sell the Jaguar, in order to move from the Arble residence…she is about to get a fortune, but for a few months she still has a small allowance and that would not allow her to Cathay – where she eventually finds a suitable residence – she is disappointed by Iseult, feels she had wanted so much to learn from her former teacher, more about Being, than having – she is wealthy anyway – and somehow the education had failed.



Furthermore, there is a mysterious – and never fully divulged intimacy between Eric and Eva, the former has made some advances to the younger woman, that much is sure, but the rest is for the reader to guess, fill in the blanks and use his imagination…this is one fantastic marvelous aspect of this book, which is revealing some aspects late in the game, allowing us to imagine…there is also that rule established by Chekhov…’if you have a shotgun in the first act, then you must use it’ not exactly in those words, but here we have a pistol and alas, that would be used to shattering, absolutely mystifying effect, though we expect it compliments of the Chekhov rule – connection that we feel at one point may result in a child being born.

Once the heroine has moved from Larkins to Cathay, Eric drives all the way to meet with the departed guest, he shows feelings and attraction, then Constantine visits, right at the time when Eric is sleeping upstairs and when Iseult follows, though later, the ensuing discussion ends with the announcement that a child will be coming, in exactly nine months since the time when Eric had been there…what would you think about that…nevertheless, when Jeremy, her son, appears, we gradually learn that the deaf and mute boy is not her biological child, and his strange presence in the life of the main character raises other questions, some of them psychoanalytical ones, about what has the heroine desired to fulfill through his presence, does she want to be mother and father for him – this is something a French doctor asks, Monsieur Bonnard, who makes an interesting statement about the fact that it is easy for us to rely on the opinion of others, which thus influences what we think of ourselves…



The son is eight, when we get into a new phase of the narrative and of all those involved, he disappears, being kidnapped for a few hours by…Iseult Arble – we find that the couple had separated, Eric has two children with ‘miss Norway ‘and lives away from his former Larkins – and there are more than peculiar developments in the personality of those involved, Eva is still less than interested in men or women – she has had quite a few traumas in her childhood and her behavior, character are more than a challenging enigma, right to the end – but she has a crash on…Henry Dancey, who reflects on the fact he was once half her age – or almost there – but he is now a student and about to graduate at Cambridge.

There has never been a sexual intercourse between Eric and Eva, but Iseult had suspected that and this supposed affair had shadowed and ultimately contributed to the separation – though there is speculation as to what the former teacher had in mind, is she had not intended something to happen, if on the other hand their relationship had not been destined to fail anyway…there is the psychological truth that affairs are just the symptom of a failed bond and their ultimate cause, difference between cause and effect – and Iseult might think of taking some sort of revenge when she takes Jeremy away.

She is also interested in the son that had been thought to fathered by her husband, Eric, there seems to be a reciprocal fascination, but it is still hard to explain why the revolver is involved in the whole episode…the end result is a Magnum opus, a fabulous chef d’oeuvre that stands together with the aforementioned other opera, The Death of the Heart and the stupendous The Heat of the Day…

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of an orphaned girl who lost her mother in a crash airplane accident. She is raised by his father and after his death, by her solicitor, Constantine.

During her whole life, she tries to get her own free life even if she is not to grown up in doing that. Her inheritance will help to disengage from the Dancey's influence.

This is a psychological romance in the sense that it shows how Eva managed to arrive in her adulthood even if she has to pay a high price for it.

[Rachelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I read this book, simply because I came out of it with this quote, which I now apply to the world of social media even though it was written in 1968: "From large or small screens, illusion overspilled on to all beheld. Society revolved at a distance from them, like a Ferris wheel dangling buckets of people."

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book until the last page then, ugh!! Why!!

Beautiful writing with a minimal plot. At times I wasn't sure what had happened and when. But the writing is excellent and I'll definitely read another by this author. I really enjoyed following the character. Though, I found myself liking the Danceys most of all and wishing she'd written a book about THEM instead.

[SarahC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowen's Eva Trout is a dynamic story of a complicated young woman in late 1950's and 1960's England. Eva is wealthy, an orphaned young woman, emotionally remote and unsure even of the value of attachment. Her actions are rash, unexplainable and without true pattern. The scenes change often in the story as she finds reason to leave any homelike setting she may have established. She puzzles at relationships and acts detrimentally toward those steadily connected to her: a guardian who was once her father's lover and who lacks trustworthiness, her teacher and mentor with a menu of her own troubles, a neighboring clergyman's family, and, finally, her own adopted, handicapped son.

This is a rare novel in that with all the complexity of the plot, it is a seamless, realistic story. Bowen's writing has constant energy, carrying the reader uninterrupted to the end, with no stops and no weak spots. She boldly describes the effects of rashness, insincerity, manipulation, and almost surreal detachment from one's own life.

I am very new to Bowen, but I believe Eva Trout was her last novel. So far, I recommend this and Bowen's The House in Paris.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

This rates pretty high on the Unsuitability of Star Ratings meter. Did i like it? Not really. I often feel disconnected from Bowen's central characters, as if, against all possible common sense and convention, she intentionally makes her central characters blank screens of boredom and her marginal characters fascinating and full of life (compare Eva and Constantine or Eva and Iseutl here). The novel is disjointed, as if she had some beautiful set-pieces (Henry in the church, Constantine and Izzy's first interview) but couldn't really be bothered stringing them together in any major way. Another reviewer points out that all the interesting action in this book takes place off-stage: that's where Eva buys/steals her child; where Constantine falls in love with Fr Clavering/converts to religion; where Eva and Izzy fail to consummate their love. It's all a bit unsatisfying, like smelling great food.

On the other hand, I'm positive that many people will come up with fascinating things to say *about* the novel as self-reflective work of modernism etc... Letter writers say things like "Life is an anti-novel;" there are incessant references to the literary tradition; she obviously set out to write an inverse comedy of manners (b.t.w., to an earlier reviewer, this does not mean 'television sitcom.' Emphasis is on 'manners,' not 'comedy;' and comedy doesn't mean laugh-a-minute one-liners.) By the end I was kind of fascinated, and thought this might be the only known book in which the heroine's being shot by her adopted son at a train station should, in all likelihood, be read as a hilarious comment on everything from Pride and Prejudice to Anna Karenina. Even if that's a good reading, though, the whole book should have given rise to more farce for it to really have worked.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen books be like......Mommy Issues

[Hester · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a feeling Bowen was trying to fashion something new here, in this her most complex and perplexing novel .

As much as there is a plot we have a series of episodes in which the character and desires of the misunderstood Eva Trout remain hidden from both herself and those around her .

There's something central about language and it's mastery . Eva is another of Bowen's surplus young women ; her mother died young and her father preferred the company of his male lover , Constantine , who has now been left as a sort of arms length guardian following Mr Trout's recent death. Eva has speech difficulties and is large and ungainly, only acquiring an education in her late adolescence having been a global camp follower of her father since birth .

The central relationship in the novel is that between Eva and her teacher , Isuelt, who unlocked her voice but then is unable to contain her .Eva has the curse of enormous wealth and finds this doesn't help her in her search for stability , for belonging and , like many unhappy people before her , she finds motherhood is only a temporary bandaid . Isuelt stumbles from grace then falls into a sort of malign but impulsive role .

There's no one very likeable here and the novel lacks warmth so that it's hard to really care . Of course Bowen's prose and dialogue is all her own but her gristly sentences without passion became indigestible . I got the impression she had been trying to emulate Iris Murdoch at her best but came up short .

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rarely has a character seemed so opaque to me. Her emotional reactions and actions are as awkward and abrupt as her physical ones, which are frequently described thus, with repeated mentions of her large frame and over-sided clothing. She hardly speaks a coherent sentence to anyone, constantly does things to mis-interpret others actions and intentions, and puts everyone around her into a total state of emotional upset at every turn. Yet everyone is very attached. I hesitate to put an anachronistic interpretation on her, but a modern reader should be forgiven for feeling that this character would be given a autism spectrum diagnosis in the current age. But without a framing rationale for Eva's emotional state and her actions, the point was lost on me. There is no answer about where the fault for the failure to connect lies and the past remains as full of misunderstandings as the present. The writing is full of questions - I mean literally question marks in descriptive passages - that seemed interesting initially, as did the very elliptical way I thought she was getting at character. But ultimately the characters weren't really got at, and the eventual plot is quite conventional, if not to say down-right Chekov-ian, and in fact quite without surprise if you know the famous quote about plot.

[Izzy E · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 and a half? The unhinged "sound and fury, signifying nothing" letter from the philosophy professor on the plane was my favourite bit. In general though I think I wanted more from this novel and its characters, and so the last scene ended up falling a little flat for me. Sometimes I found the writing beautiful, sometimes I wanted to chuck the book out of the window.

[Sarah Tittle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of strange and ultimately disappointing. I love Elizabeth Bowen, but I realize that her language can feel stilted, mostly because her syntax is so odd.

[Cas (Fia)]

This cover is everything

[Chuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a real slog for me. Apparently, this was Bowen's last book in 1968 before she died. I have not read other Bowen, but I was constantly put off by, well, every character in the book. While many character's flaws are laid bare, I learned very little as to why they tick, or why I should care about them. The title character is a wounded and very insular woman. Other characters constantly talk about her oddness and how others struggle to like her. Eva tends to gracelessly do as she pleases, yet share very little with others (is she autistic? narcissistic personality disorder?).

Everyone seems to work hard at maintaining airs of invulnerability while one-upping each other with wounding observations. Interestingly, the one character that brings energy to the story, is Eva's custodian Constantine - an Oscar Wilde-ish dandy with a tongue sharp enough to cut glass. He astute observations and humorously bitter comments left me wondering if he, not Eva, was the surrogate character that speaks for the author. The story meander over years, locations, and characters, dipping into melodrama just as it's gaining steam.

My two stars are for Bowen's very descriptive and insightful observations. However, this novel delivered the ultimate blow by being so obvious in its setup of its painfully melodramatic ending, that I regret to report I accurately predicted, at least 50 pages prior, the very melodramatic and abrupt climax that roles out on the last 2 pages of the book.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This the last of Bowen's books, set partly in 1959 and resuming in 1967. The story is not too period-specific but there is an implication that the protagonist, a very wealthy single woman in her 20s, had to go from the UK to America to adopt a child via some black market channels because that was the only way she could do so - not something I had previously thought about.
The titular Eva Trout is considerably insulated from the consequences of her own eccentricities by her inherited wealth. The cast of supporting characters is entertaining if not always entirely believable: the vicar with hay fever, his son the Cambridge student who always says "one" rather than "I" in an increasingly convoluted way, the wealthy epicurean homosexual and so on.
The unexpected violent incident which ends the book, with little obvious foreshadowing, may or may not be typical of Bowen. The only other book of hers I've read, The Heat of the Day, has something sort of comparable - I wonder whether she influenced Iris Murdoch's tendency to do the same?

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I honestly have no idea what to make of this book. Bowen's writing is beautiful, but she's produced a novel with a completely enigmatic central character, in which anything interesting or exciting happens before or after the action she describes. Weird, sullen, awkward Eva drifts about confounding the people she encounters. She adopts, or buys, or something a little boy in America, then returns to England to drift around some more.

She has some sort of malign influence on the people she encounters, including her bitchy financial guardian; a waspish, discontented schoolteacher and her hapless husband; and the son of the local vicar. But it's hard to see how, because she doesn't DO anything. At any rate, one of these people ends up destroying her, quite abruptly, the end.

I have a feeling that the book worked on some entirely different level that I didn't grasp at all.

[Emily]

I'm not totally giving up on Elizabeth Bowen yet, but this book was a complete and total let-down. After the first two chapters I had to stop and read the Wikipedia article about it because I was just tremendously lost on the nuance of the dialogue and I got the feeling something was happening in the story that wasn't immediately obvious in the text. Of course, all of this was done on purpose, but it didn't appeal to me. Clicking "I'm finished" to write this review was a lie but I just wanted to be done with this book. I'm keeping it on my shelf though because the cover is pretty.

[ana inés · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very strange read, but an enjoyable one. The book is hilarious but in a subtle way, and there were many times where I had to stop and go back to try and figure out what on Earth was going on, but it was still a pleasure. It's definitely a trip one needs to embark on with full awareness of how bizarre it's going to be.

[Jes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a weird, intense, gorgeous book. If Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf had a child and raised it on a steady diet of ghost stories, noir fiction, and queer lit, the result would be Elizabeth Bowen.

[Barbara Sibbald]

The novel is book-ended by two apparently phony marriages. In both cases, Eva Trout is the bride. It is a neat device to illuminate Eva’s defects and desires: she wants family and to be settled but both are foreign to her due to her itinerant childhood. Her mother died early, leaving Eva to travel the globe with her father, Willy, a wealthy businessman. The only constants are Constantine Ormeau, Willy’s long-time lover and Eva’s guardian, and later, when Eva is a teen, her teacher Iseult, whom Eva hopes can help her learn to think. The fact is Eva is not wholly formed. Her facial features are never described: revealing of the fact that she herself is half-formed and trying to discover who she is; what her purpose might be.

Eva is self-centred, childish even, and this causes mayhem, but its Iseult who causes harm. She makes Eva think she can be helped, then refuses to help her. She grows disenchanted with her husband and throws him at Eva. Then leaves him though he still loves her. She is a frustrated writer but leaves her typewriter when she leaves her husband. Then she kidnaps Eva’s adopted son Jeremy and provides a gun that is fired in the final scene. In the end, she is an observer: and it is Eva she most observes.

Much of the writing is post-modern; it’s not an easy read and sometimes important details are mired in inconsequential twaddle. There are also some exceedingly convoluted sentences, for example: Sir Luke Fildes, one of the sought-after reproductions of whose painting this on the wall was, also gave authenticity to the table – apparently?” p 116.

And yet there are wonderful observations. Iseult, who longs to write, but cannot, says “I am soiled by living more than a thousand lives; I have lived through books. I have lived internally.” And as Eva tries to figure things out, the narrative voice comments: “…there is no hope of keeping a check on people; you cannot know what they do, or why they do it. Situations alter for no knowable reason – as though a game continued while you were away from the board or have left the table. See what had taken place during Eva’s absence: lovers become indifferent to each other, enemies, friends or at least confederates. One plot unraveled, another knitting. Re-alignments, out-of-character overtures, fresh fancies budding from hoary boughs. Yet here the personae were, as before. As ever.” p 216.


Much to my frustration, however, the novel leaves numerous questions unanswered: What happened between Iseult and Jeremy when she kidnapped him? Why did she? Why wouldn’t Eva call the cops? What did Iseult do all those months in France when she disappeared? That is the attraction between Iseult and Eric? And on and on.

Scenes, dialogue keep coming back to me. It’s an intriguing book, densely packed. Perhaps I’ll figure it out more completely with time, meanwhile, I’ll look for some of her more celebrated titles and short stories. I regret that this was my introduction to Bowen’s work because I sense that she can be magnificent.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A clever, character based novel, about Eva Trout, who at age 23, is about to inherit a large fortune from her father. Eva’s behaviour is mysterious and she does things based on spur of the moment decisions. Eva’s wealth seems in many ways to be a hinderance to her psychological well being. It’s a very well written novel about conspiracy, duplicity and ambiguity. The protagonist, Eva Trout, is annoying is her capacity to trouble others and attract trouble to herself.

Here is an example of the author’s writing style:
‘The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one’s acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.’

This book was short listed for the 1970 Booker prize.