In the waning weeks of the summer of 1920, Lois Farquar is on the cusp of adulthood, and Ireland is on the cusp of revolution. While Lois considers her future path — art school, marriage, a life of adventure like the enigmatic Marda leads — the countryside around her family’s stately home grows ever more tense, with British soldiers and Black and Tans on the roads and IRA gunmen lurking in the shadows. The gentle comedy of manners promised in the opening pages runs headlong into the tragedy of war, and an era of big houses and bucolic landscapes comes to a fiery end.
The Last September is the first Elizabeth Bowen book I’ve read, but it will certainly not be the last — I’m not sure how I’ve missed her so far, but I intend to correct that gap in my reading. Her prose is lucid and straightforward, and her characters are both enchanting and infuriating. Lois, the main consciousness through which we see the story, is as self-obsessed and myopic as any eighteen-year-old, though she has occasional flashes of insight into the predicament in which she finds herself as a member of the last generation of the old Anglo-Irish gentry. Though the Irish War of Independence is the story’s backdrop, the political situation is typically obscured, glimpsed only through the occasional bluster of frustrated British officers who visit the Danielstown estate, the wariness of once-friendly villagers, and a few harrowing encounters on the periphery of the war. When the war does finally intrude on the idyll in all its tragic fury, it’s like a bomb being suddenly thrown into a Jane Austen drawing room, all the more powerful for its abrupt incongruity.
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