A World of Love

(By Elizabeth Bowen; Alfred A. Knopf; 244 pp.; $3.50)

The maxim, avoid mass, has gained a select following in the ranks of both British and American novelists in the last few years. The tendency is to state, not to show; and the reader's duty is to observe, not to emphasize. Long, Trollope or Tolstoy-type works, with their series of minute contradictions and counter-contradictions within each paragraph over several hundred pages, have been abandoned in preference to far shorter works, such as The Old Man and The Sea. "Mass" or "body" in a novel is now not requisite; therefore both character development and the illusion of realism are secondary to the thematic and stylistic concerns of the author.

This trend is not new, nor is it likely to become standard procedure for future novelists. In the Thirties the group labeled "Esoterics" practiced it with varying degrees of transient success. Andre Gide in France, by giving his works the title of novels perhaps broadened beyond all reason the size qualifications of a novelist. These works are really not novels at all, but allegorical essays, lacking "mass" and concentrating fully on style and theme.

Such a book is Elizabeth Bowen A World of Love. It deals principally with the effect of past passion on a hermetically sealed group of people, living in an ancient, decaying Irish castle. These five people, two young girls, their father and mother and the fortyish divorced woman who owns the castle--all are singularly purposeless. They neither concern themselves with the world at large, nor wish to, until the eldest daughter, Jane, finds a packet of love letters in a dusty trunk in the attic. This event, of course, changes all their lives, for the author of these billet doux was none other than the one great passion of both the elderly women in the castle. He had died on a foreign field in World War I. By falling in love with the love-letters. Jane awakens here circle from its lethargy and prepares herself to find her own happiness in reality.

The theme of A World of Love thus seems to have two major tenets: 1) it is not correct to live in the past, to seal oneself from the exigencies and rhapsodies of the present; and 2) the way to extricate oneself from such decadence is to search for a positive and present love. Undoubtedly, this theme may have present and cosmic significance, but I do not believe it either necessary or possible to trace its symbolic overtones. Its nearly platitudinous magnitude defies any precise application to immediate world problems.

Only Bowen's style, then, makes A World of Love an above average work. As her opening description of the countryside around the Irish castle, she writes: "The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of one house, and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world--painted expectant, empty, intense. This month was June. . ."

She has a similar richness of wording when she says: ". . . the lamp chimney around the urged-on lamp flame itself, spurting threads of itself and smoke stinkingly upward toward the ceiling, crimsonly stuttered inside the gloom it made like an evil tongue."

In A World of Love, Bowen really seems to take the part of skillful puppeteer. She does not ask that the reader believe in the puppets which are her characters. In fact, she manipulates them without attempting to hide herself behind a partition; instead, she is in full view, showing her audience the mastery of her art. If the observer cares to enlarge the puppets' actions into universal concepts, that is up to him.