Oh, the mellifluous, soothing voice of Forster! I don’t know what it is, but something just kicks into place in my innermost recesses when I read his Oh, the mellifluous, soothing voice of Forster! I don’t know what it is, but something just kicks into place in my innermost recesses when I read his best novels. Stephen King has said that it’s the writers we read when we are young who impact us the most, perhaps in ways we don’t always realize. That may be why it’s more than just a reading experience to me when I read Forster; I feel that I meet not only my younger self but my true self when I read him.
Maurice is the novel Forster wrote some 55 years before it was published because the time he lived in was one of hypocrisy and intolerance. Indeed, Maurice, the main character, refers to himself a couple of times as one of the unmentionable Oscar Wilde types, and we know what happened to Oscar Wilde only a decade or so previously. Forster had a view which there was no room for, cf. the title of another of his novels, and only a few of his closest friends saw the novel in his own lifetime.
The novel is about Maurice’s seemingly impossible search for happiness in a world where homosexuality is illegal and in an England which is still marred by a rigid view of class distinctions. It is a brave attempt to paint a possible utopia which, sadly, Forster himself never lived to see, and it is a touching portrait of two people’s ultimate refusal to bow to the expectations of the times, as well as one man’s claim to have been able to change his sexuality.
Like Zadie Smith, I can see that Forster sometimes borders on the mawkish and the sentimental, but like Smith, I really don’t care. His works remind me that it is possible to write feelingly and touchingly about human relations within the relatively narrow confines of literary fiction. All of Forster’s works are about his humanistic vision, and wish, that we ‘only connect’. I am unapologetic in my love of Forster, and I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. ...more
Having recently read Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room, which was brilliant, and having a life-long love of E.M. Forster, I was prepared to love this nHaving recently read Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room, which was brilliant, and having a life-long love of E.M. Forster, I was prepared to love this novel about the English writer. I liked it a lot but for some reason not quite as much as I loved The Master, a similar novel, in which Colm Toíbín eloquently and plausibly muses on Henry James’s life and books.
As in The Master, in which Toíbín calls his protagonist Henry, Galgut calls his hero Morgan throughout, lovingly as I interpreted it, and it brings the reader closer to him (and his first name wasn’t meant to be Edward anyway, Galgut tells us; his father accidentally said his own name at the christening. Had he been less absent-minded, Forster’s first name would have been the same as James’s).
The title – Arctic Summer – was the title of a novel Forster never finished and seems fitting for this portrait of him, his last and unrevealed story, as it were. It is part plausible story-telling based on research and part Galgut’s rendition of Forster’s thoughts about his homosexuality and the two main loves of his life (at least during the period that we follow him), Syed Ross Masood and Mohammed el-Adl, and less so his thoughts about his books. (In a conversation with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the end of the novel, Forster says that he isn’t really a novelist. Virginia agrees, Leonard does not). For my own part, I would have liked a bit more about his novels.
Galgut returns to India in this novel, and to travelling. He creates a story in which Forster puts together his major works, but the novel builds up to the creation of what many consider to be Forster’s masterpiece, A Passage to India. Galgut’s novel delineates the other novel's development and suggests where many of its ideas spring from. It took Forster some twelve years to write; he continually abandoned it, deeming his memories of India inauthentic, until he visited it again.
Lines from Passage are strewn throughout this novel as if Forster had picked up bits and pieces from conversations and events over the 12 years from its conception to its final composition, which he may well have done. I recognized lines spoken by Dr. Aziz and Dr. Godbole, descriptions of Forster’s journey to the Barabar Caves (which became the Marabar Caves) and his thoughts on the British Raj, many of which made Passage such an important book at the time. Forster had the keenest eyes when it came to observing the English in India but also in-depth knowledge of some of the differences between Hindus and Muslims in India and, thus, of the complexities of Indian politics at the time.
A lot of guess work is necessarily involved as to Forster’s feelings of loss and inadequacy, his way of being a forlorn, gentle man unable to fathom, let alone experience, the depths of his own sexual desires. (We are reminded in the beginning of the novel that Wilde was imprisoned only 17 years previously). Much of this is both probable and reasonable, but I felt less willing to grant Galgut the liberty of imagining Forster’s small sexual encounters so explicitly. It seemed intrusive somehow because Forster himself hid this part of himself from all but his closest friends, although I suspect that may have been one of Galgut’s reasons for including them: to imagine them out into the open. (And my need to protect Forster post-humously is no doubt entirely misplaced – this is art, after all – but those were my feelings). I have to admit that it also grated on my ears that the word nevertheless is used perhaps 20 times in the novel (yet didn’t work? Or even so, however?, leaving it out?).
In conclusion, though, I read this as an affective homage to Forster. Like Forster – and through painting this portrait of him – Galgut explores human connections and travelling, two of my favourite topics. At one point in the novel, Forster sees a sign in India which is characteristically misspelled and which comes to be a kind of theme in A Passage to India: the memorable God si love, an orthographically inaccurate but quite wonderful way, to my mind, of reiterating the epigraph to Howards End: Only connect.
Delightful, informative and sympathetic insight into the life and mind of one of the authors who, years ago, first made me fall in love with English lDelightful, informative and sympathetic insight into the life and mind of one of the authors who, years ago, first made me fall in love with English literature. And written by a Dane to boot. I was so surprised to see this book at my local library, surprised that another Danish woman has loved Forster's works as I have, so much so that she has managed to have a book published about him. Well done. (In Danish alas, so available to a limited audience)....more
This is not an easy novel for me to review because I love E.M. Forster, but I didn’t love this book. The overall storyline I liked well enough: a younThis is not an easy novel for me to review because I love E.M. Forster, but I didn’t love this book. The overall storyline I liked well enough: a young Cambridge man discusses philosophy with his fellow students, finishes life at university, which he has enjoyed immensely, and tries to establish himself as a writer, only to be lured away by a woman, by marriage, by the woman’s brother and his insistence on the main character making his way in the world by teaching instead of writing, thus marking a deroute which only truth and a half-brother he didn’t know he had might help him out of. In the process, of course, he loses touch with his real friends and his real self.
The problem for me lay mainly in the tone and in the author’s intrusion. There were way too many metaphysical musings, references to Pan or Aphrodite or some other symbol that pertained to the story, which stopped me in my narrative drive and irritated me. Had the characters themselves had a fraction of these thoughts, it might have improved things for me. The time it took me to read it tells me that I wasn’t exactly dying to find out what would happen next, and this was also because I didn’t really care about the characters much. In addition, they had the weirdest dialogs I’ve read in a long time. If I didn’t know it was Forster being serious, I might have thought it was Waugh satirizing the English middle classes.
The themes of conventions and normality vs. nature and spirituality were too heavily drawn out, the ideal of the brute savage (the half brother) and the shallow wife a bit too nauseating or simplistic as emblems of good and bad, although I appreciate the ideas behind them. The story, or lack thereof, bored me sometimes, but on the other hand I saw the makings of Forster’s masterpieces, Howards End and A Passage to India and also ideas explored in A Room with a View – all novels that I love. If you’ve never read Forster, this is certainly not the place to start. (Why then three stars, you may ask? Because it’s Forster, and he and I go way back. I couldn't possibly go lower than three). ...more
As much as I absolutely love some of Forster’s novels, there was something about this book which failed to reach me entirely. In about half of it, he As much as I absolutely love some of Forster’s novels, there was something about this book which failed to reach me entirely. In about half of it, he was lucid and original, using text examples that I knew, and lifting their meanings to new heights; introducing his famous ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters. But in the other half (or so), I felt that he was unnecessarily allegorical and metaphysical, and he lost me at times.
The book is divided into chapters about The Story, People, The Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, Pattern and Rhythm, which provide Forster’s analysis of, of course, the foremost aspects of novels. As literary criticism or an elucidation of the qualities a reader must bring to the appreciation of books, it gives an overall feeling of something which is almost spiritual, certainly aesthetic, almost slightly out of one’s grasp. As an illustration of the elements of the craft of novel writing, there isn’t much in concrete terms, but this is Forster’s style. His is a hazy, dreamy, yet astute perception of the art of the novel, and he doesn’t hesitate – along the way – to pass judgment on some of the grandest names of his trade, including Scott, Dickens and James, which was rather entertaining, certainly illuminating.
He employs a majestic ‘we’, which rather irritated me sometimes, signaling some kind of collusion when saying ‘we all consider this novel so and so.’ The overall tone is quaint, yet casual, witty but opinionated, and I would have loved being in attendance when he gave these lectures, and being the annoying person in the audience who asked all the stupid questions (‘So are you really saying that James’s characters are dead?’ would perhaps be what I’d start out with). ...more
Rereading this old favourite reminded me of my university days back in the 90s when I first discovered E. M. Forster and fell completely in love with Rereading this old favourite reminded me of my university days back in the 90s when I first discovered E. M. Forster and fell completely in love with his works. I devoured several of his books at the time as well as the wonderful Merchant-Ivory (and other) film adaptations of his best novels.
This time round it was a different reading experience, as it always is when you read something many years later; the book is the same, but you’ve changed (and have read many more books). I still appreciate his Edwardian humanism and the gentle, sympathetic temper which seems to pervade the novel, but it didn’t blow me away this time as it did twenty years ago. This time round, I also noted his sometimes antiquated (but, given the times, perhaps inevitable) view of women. And yet, at other times his view of women is surprisingly modern, but then he was a marginal member of the Bloomsbury group, whose female beacon was Virginia Woolf.
He has been criticized for his mysticism or leanings towards the metaphysical, which is even more pronounced in A Passage to India, and this is one aspect I used to love but have somehow grown out of. What I do still appreciate, and which is one of the reasons why I love this period in English literary history, are the concepts and images developed, which belong to this pre-World War I period: motoring (!) into the country, the personality of old houses, the peace of the country (as opposed to the flux of London, indeed of modern life, making itself increasingly visible beyond nearby hills), truth, art, literature; and specifically to Forster: the connection between people of different classes and mentalities, between the mind and the body – or perhaps more the desire to try to connect.
I felt the presence of other works this time round as well, one after the publication of Howards End (by Virginia Woolf) and one before (by Jane Austen): Mrs. Wilcox drifts through life much like Mrs. Dalloway drifts through London, physically as well as emotionally. Or maybe I see the resemblance because both characters were played by Vanessa Redgrave in the film adaptations. As to the reference to Austen (whom Forster loved), there are the two sisters in Howards End, Helen and Margaret/Meg Schlegel, who are respectively wild/temperamental and sensible/mature – much like two other sisters, Marianne and Eleanor Dashwood. Interestingly, Emma Thompson played both Margaret Schlegel and Eleanor Dashwood in the film versions. The symmetry of this seems amazing but completely right. Helen was supposedly also partly inspired by Woolf as a child. As an adult, Woolf, too, was a huge Austen fan. But of course I may just have taken Forster’s epigram to the novel ‘Only connect’ too literally and connected these authors’ works because I love them. (Although Woolf reminds us that all works of literature stand on the shoulders of the literature that came before). ...more
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