The Shelbourne. By Elizabeth Bowen.
(Harrap. r Es.)
Miss BOWEN'S choice of the principal hotel in Dublin as the subject for a history, or perhaps the hotel's choice of Miss Bowen as historian, is not happy. The story might, one guesses, have been made interesting by a writer with more feeling for other people's recorded experiences, and perhaps with sharper sense of ridicule. Buts as it is, it is sadly flat and laboured. " A great hotel has three aspects—historic, social, organic." " Vast meals were spread and partaken of." We learn about broken contracts for window-frames ; and even the mice let loose among. the dowagers by wags of the Eleventh Hussars do not bring the matter to life. What is wrong becomes clear if one compares the treatment of the Easter Rising and the Troubles in this book with that in Miss Bowen's novel The Last September. All the intensity and muffled passion in her novels come from what did not happen. To the novelist the bloodshed and upheaval in Ireland were things which, from a distance, slowed up life, and even stopped it ; house and heroine are left empty shells, alone. But the historian Miss Bowen has no heart for grappling with what did happen, with many people who did many things instead of one person to whom one thing did not happen.
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