A House in Paris…

I was lured into reading The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen (1935) thinking it would show me a Paris I now recognise. In some ways it does. The titular house is almost as much of a character as the individuals who populate it. But there is very little of the city itself to be found in the pages. The novel is framed by journeys as eleven-year-old Henrietta travels from and to train stations. All the reader sees, like Henrietta herself, are rain-washed streets and lights on the river. Henrietta waits at the house, which belongs to the bed-ridden, irascible, Madame Fisher, until the next leg of her journey to the south of France. Also in transit there, is nine-year-old Leopold who is waiting to meet his mother for the first time. The other primary occupant of the house is Naomi Fisher, the put upon spinster daughter of the owner. Set across one day, the novel explores a decade of betrayal and deception through the eyes of the two children.

Although the pace is often slow, once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. Despite the complex spectres of adult relations that haunt the house, Henrietta and Leopold talk and play as children will. Surrounded by powerful emotions, their friendship develops quickly as the day turns in unexpected ways. Miss Fisher never does take Henrietta on a promised visit to the Trocadéro; Leopold’s long-awaited mother never comes. Both children have disconcerting visits to the old woman in the darkened upstairs bedroom and it is gradually revealed to the reader that the Fishers are major players in Leopold’s story, although they have been forbidden to answer any of his questions by his adoptive parents. Parts I and III of the novel are entitled, The Present. Part II, The Past, offers the reader an imagined explanation of the tangled relations between Naomi and Leopold’s mother, Karen Michaelis.

This is one of those wonderful novels that makes absence a central dramatic force, particularly the absence of parents. Mothers are either physically or emotionally removed, fathers ineffectual or self-absorbed. The house itself is stifling, especially the salon which confines the children as they wait for their onward journeys. Other imagined past houses in Cork, Twickenham and London are equally claustrophobic.

This is clearly a modernist novel, a subtle blend of stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse that draws the reader inescapably into the lives of the characters. The children are precocious and sympathetic simultaneously, representing the unfinished traumas of the adult world that produced them, which is both repellent and captivating. The House in Paris is curiously Parisian, but I didn’t find Paris here. I would highly recommend reading it, nonetheless. For now, though, perhaps I’ll just look out of my window to find Paris instead.