A World of Love Book

So much to love about this short novel which depicts how a family in a ramshackle flaking farmhouse in Ireland live with a ghost.

Lilia is engaged to Guy when he dies in the war. She goes to seed. Eventually Guy's cousin Antonia persuades her to marry Fred, a roving farmhand, and take possession of Guy's house. Lilia and Fred produce two children. The older, Jane, one day finds some old letters in the attic and Guy's ghost is let loose into the house. The letters were written by Guy but to whom is the mystery which explodes into the fragile equilibrium of life at Montefort.

The five main characters in this novel are all fabulous as is the dialogue they share. Lilia is a familiar Bowen character, the disappointed woman who has married beneath herself. The rivalry between her and the artistic but dehydrated Antonia is executed with thrilling insight throughout. I can't recall many novels - Ferrante's maybe - that dramatise so well the competitive rivalry that can exist between two women. They compete for influence over Lilia's daughter Jane whose sexuality is awakened by finding and reading the letters. The younger daughter Maud reads aloud psalms from the Bible as curses and has an invisible familiar called Guy David who she keeps with her at all times. She provides Bowen with so much fabulous comedy. Fred, the husband, is belittled by the presence of the letters. The sixth character and maybe the best of all is the house and surrounding landscape. Bowen's descriptive writing is at its very best here.

Occasionally Bowen is guilty of over mystification, of straining too hard to prise out meaning from her stage sets - usually when summoning Guy's ghost who, it should be said, isn't a physical ghost. It was only these passages and there aren't many of them that persuaded me to meanly dock a star. On the whole though VS Pritchett gets it right - "Electric and urgent…she startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh."