Reviews for Bioluminescence and chemiluminescence

The average rating for Bioluminescence and chemiluminescence based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-20 00:00:00 Ryan Oballe For me this novel is overloaded with mystification. Bowen is trying too hard to charge every line of dialogue, every piece of descriptive writing with psychological insight. When it works it’s brilliant but too often here it doesn’t and she seems guilty of the charge most often levelled at her – that she is more sensibility than substance. There’s far too much elaborately described minutiae in this book. The Little Girls has a terrific premise. Three elderly women meet up again to dig up the coffer containing secret cherished objects they buried as children. The novel is divided in three parts – the middle section shows us the three women as the children they once were. The characters, like the narrator, skirt around the many mysteries raised, few of which don’t remain hidden from us. Her experiments with dialogue are at their most stylised here. Apparently throwaway lines, often with inverted sentence structures, are wired with depth charges and explode relentlessly. Here it’s a technique that seems like a hit and miss mannerism; in the subsequent Eva Trout it acquires a masterful artistry - the ostensibly realistic and throwaway dialogue containing within its linguistic mannerisms, contortions and inversions deep psychological truths about the private soul of the speaker. It’s dialogue as oracle but expressed in simple everyday language. In The Little Girls however it felt like Bowen is forcing meaning on everything as if we’re in the midst of a poem, not a novel. Along with her first two books, The Hotel and Friends and Relations, my least favourite Bowen novel.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-31 00:00:00 Alan White In What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, Welty and Maxwell mention Elizabeth Bowen quite often, with affection, but also, or so it seemed to me, with amused tolerance as well. Reading between the lines, I got the feeling she could be idiosyncratic, perhaps even difficult, though they both seemed to unconditionally love her. From the little bit I've read of Bowen, her style seems to reflect the personality I've gleaned. Her syntax is purposely awkward (Yoda-speak, we might call it now), as are her characters and their dialogue. Many times a line needs to be read twice to get at its meaning, though if I rearrange the syntax in my head, it doesn't work as well as what's on the page -- obviously she knew what she was doing. And I certainly don't mind novels that make me 'work.' In this novel there's the present, then the past (She throws us into the middle of evocative childhood scenes, also not always easy to understand what is going on at first. This section reminded me a bit of The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor, another Anglo-Irish writer.), then back to the present again, with enough 'mystery' to keep the reader reading. As the last chapter spools out, I felt an excitement, as I knew all the 'work' would be worth it. Its effectiveness increased as each page was turned, with the last three pages being the loveliest of all.