Friends and Relations

FRIENDS AND RELATIONS has been for quite some time, unfairly, the ugly stepchild among Elizabeth Bowen's novels, and it remains one of the very few (as of this writing) no longer in print. Much of this may have to do with its somewhat generic sounding title, which might seem to betray a kind of writer's desperation as to what to call a novel, although it is actually stingingly appropriate. The main concern of this shorter but extremely complex novel is how our love relationships are forever complicated and even betrayed by the other ties in our lives with our friends and relations. The earlier part of the novel, showing the odd entanglements among four families--the Studdards, Tilneys, Meggatts, and Thirdmans--, proceeds mostly as what might be Bowen's funniest social comedy, held among her usual milieux (drawing rooms, tearooms, and girls' boarding-school dormitories) and peopled by her usual coterie of memorable upper middle-class characters: cool hostesses, brittle mothers, penetrating children, and gauche teenagers. But the final third of the novel veers nearly into the realm of tragedy when Edward Tilney and his sister-in-law Janet Meggatt admit their secret love to themselves and one another, and threaten to rip apart their families and friends alike. John Halperin has rightly compared this section of the novel to Henry James's THE GOLDEN BOWL, wherein two other wealthy couples become tragically entangled by the illicit love of one husband for a relation who is not his wife. Although Bowen does not manage to flesh out her central two couples (Edward and Laurel, Rodney and Janet) to the degree that James does the four central characters of his famous novel--or even to the degree she fills out her minor characters in this novel--, the ethical and stylistic complexity of FRIENDS AND RELATIONS makes it almost as fine as Bowen's masterpieces, THE DEATH OF THE HEART and TO THE NORTH.