The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel: review "Paris is so young and gay that she could stand a little battering," Harold Nicolson wrote on Christmas Day of 1940 after three months of the Blitz, "but London is a charwoman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed." Lara Feigel has had the inspired idea of writing an ensemble piece about five novelists who endured the bombs and blackouts in London when its teeth were being bashed out. The novelists are Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay and Hilde Spiel - the latter a refugee from the Nazis, with a high reputation in her native Austria, but beached in Wimbledon with a pesky husband and thieving neighbours. Feigel is a young academic with lively interests and eager curiosity. She has previously edited both Stephen Spender's voluminous journals and a volume on the English seaside in literature and cinema. At a time when many dons sterilise themselves in theory, defend their flimsy doctrines inside dense thickets of jargon, and are oblivious of human character or motive, Feigel writes with modesty and grace, never patronises or sentimentalises her subjects, and makes the reader glad to be sharing her ideas. The Love-charm of Bombs is a bounding success as an account of wartime London and as a study of highly strung but tough characters under stress, and of the way that novelists transmute adultery into great art. It evokes the inflamed skies, desolate streets, gashed buildings, broken windows, crushed or scorched corpses - and the ways that these stimulated novelists. The Blitz gave a painterly pleasure: "London is extraordinarily pleasant these days with all the new spaces, and the rather Mexican effect of ruined churches," Graham Greene told Anthony Powell in December 1940; a surrealist who saw stockings entangled in a tree in the Regent's Park, with bomb-blasted purple damask wallpaper and a spruce bowler hat dangling nearby, smirked, "Of course we were painting this sort of thing years ago, but it has taken us some time to get here." Henry Green was a volunteer fireman, Bowen and Greene were ARP wardens, and Macaulay was an over-age ambulance driver. The latter had the worst time. On the heaviest night of the Blitz, in May 1941, her Marylebone flat was incinerated by a firebomb - destroying her rare books, manuscripts and worse still, 20 years of love letters from her married lover, who was dying. Searching for her multi-volume Oxford Dictionary ("my Bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure"), she found one charred page in the debris - definitions for hotbeds, hotchpots, hot cockles, hotes and hotels were still decipherable. Thereafter she spent her spare hours exploring ravaged London, shinning down bomb craters, finding saplings, rosebay and fennel blossoming within collapsed walls. Sex was an urgent need when death was so abundant. The couplings were sometimes furtive but often conspicuous, at times casual or desperate, but also included once-in-a-lifetime grand passions. Among Feigel's subjects, all but Spiel were practised adulterers. Macaulay had an intense affair for more than 20 years with a married man who had once been a Catholic priest. Green and Greene were both inveterate womanisers. Bowen lived in a companionate marriage in which her husband tolerated her affairs with other men: her involvement with the Irish novelist Sean O'Faolain petered out early in the war, and in 1941 she began her ardent involvement with a young diplomat, Charles Ritchie, who later wrote: "Wartime London was a forcing-ground for love and friendship, for experiments and amusements snatched under pressure." Wartime tension and danger exonerated lovers from guilt, seemed to protract their time together into eternal moments - made them, in Bowen's words, "moody, hardy and lyrical." Feigel's book is refreshing for being concerned with adult passions, responsibilities and choices. Green wrote of a five-year-old boy: "Christopher was like any other child of his age, not very interested or interesting, strident with health. He enjoyed teasing and was careful no one should know what he felt. These were novelists who neither obsessed about children nor infantilised their characters and readers. They had too much self-respect and fortitude to indulge in victimhood. Superb books came from these experiences of London under aerial bombardment. Inspired by a Michael Innes detective novel, Greene wrote his thriller, The Ministry of Fear, about London in the Blitz; and followed this with The End of the Affair - based on the convulsive intensity of his grand amour with Catherine Walston. Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness depicts an uprooted, bewildered girl creating her own wild existence in the rubble wastelands around St Paul's Cathedral. Green's Caught - published in 1943 - is a captivating novel about the fire service in combustible wartime London, which remains after 70 years a book of surpassing skill and thrill. Bowen produced a masterpiece in The Heat of the Day, a novel inspired by her passion for Ritchie, with a background of buzz-bombs and sirens, and a giddying sense of doubt and insecurity. Feigel's chronicle sent me scurrying to read Caught, and to revisit the others. They are as powerful and devastating as she promises. I haven't for many a year read a book of literary scholarship with such impatience to know what happens next. The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War Lara Feigel Bloomsbury, £25, 492pp Read on 1 The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (1943). 2 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948). 3 The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay (1950).