The Big House era is coming to an end in Ireland and Bowen captures the moment of collapse and the sense of entropy where ‘it seems the same time all day’ and pointlessness of the world of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency classes. It’s a novel of destruction and preservation as Bowen gives us a record of her class in its dying days. The Naylors, Trents, Vermonts and Montmorencys carry on regardless with their dinner evenings, tennis parties and various social obligations with relative indifference to the violent backdrop of national unrest following the war of independence. Any little incursions of danger are met with a sense of excitement and adventure ‘wouldn't’ it be a rag if they tried to fire in the window while we were dancing’ - an opportunity to use the African assegais on display in the hall. It’s a novel of perspective and distance, of varying vistas and positions of observation. The big house looms over its inhabitants, figures move about the garden ant-like, the mountain, in turn, looms over the house and on the mountain, secretive men in trenchcoats - dangerous patriots or Black and Tans - watch the activities of Danielstown. Goodbyes are so distant as at the little end of a telescope, the Anglo-Irish gentry is at a certain remove in terms of lifestyle, politics and moral standards from the English upper middle-classes; characters are distant from one another and things left unsaid go sour inside them. The house is full of mirrors and characters observing themselves go unobserved by others and vice versa. Themes of scale and perspective are indicative of other modernist Irish writers like Joyce who were trying to represent the geography of a rapidly changing island. The sense of decay in The Last September is palpable and manifests in incomplete sentences, dying pink flowers shadowed with blue as by an intuition of death, a dead woman’s trunk rotting in the attic, the smell of mould in the drawing-room, the mill ruins and rain having washed all the markings off the court, all point toward deterioration; the past giving way to an unknown future. Incidentally, the line of succession is further undermined by the lack of progeny. Sterility is a major theme in the novel where children are de trop.
Beautifully written