E. M. Forster (1879–1970)

I had actually never read any E. M. Forster before teaching this novel. There's a lot going on in it: it amazes me to think that anyone could have ever wondered if it was pro-British or pro-Indian, but maybe that's my modern anti-colonialist biases at work. (Though maybe as a feminist, I should believe the accusation.) The crux of the whole book is arguably the incident in the caves, but the alleged sexual assault is just one part of that. There's a weird break in the narration at that show more moment-- if there is a sexual assault, it occurs between pages, and that feels like a cheat designed to up the ambiguity, given how closely Forster renders point-of-view throughout the rest of the novel.

But is it a cheat? If there was a sexual assault, it's a very modernist move to indicate it through a break in narration: the trauma of the event would render it unthinkable and therefore unnarratable. (It's kind of like, but very different to, how Hardy handles the rape of Tess in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I taught in the same class.)

However, then the cheat becomes: if there wasn't a sexual assault, why is there a break in the narration? The answer to that, I would argue, lies earlier in the novel, where we are told, "Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence" (146). Like all moments where fiction tells you about what fiction does, you have to read this as indicative of what this work of fiction is or is not doing. According to A Passage to India, there are long passages of time where nothing happens, where the brain is lying if it indicates emotion was actually felt: "a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent" (146). So if nothing happened in the caves, of course there's a break in the narration, because if nothing is happening, the book must be silent since this book is a "perfectly adjusted organism," not an exaggerator like all those earlier works of fiction.

What is easy to overlook if you focus on the sexual assault, I think, is that there's another act of violence in the cave: Mrs. Moore's crisis of faith. Mrs. Moore struggles with what she thought were fundamentals of existence when she finally travels to a place where they are not true. India is older than anything in world (135), upsetting her beliefs in Britain and in Christianity, and the darkness of the cave shows how a whisper can be echoed to seem all-consuming (166). She thinks the cave is evil, but it turns out to just be that the cave amplifies what is brought into it; I never thought I'd make this comparison, but it's basically the cave from The Empire Strikes Back. In the end, she cannot write down what happened (165)-- it really was too traumatic for her. Later we are told that there is no sorrow like Mrs. Moore's sorrow, the experience of an utterly unprofound vision. When East meets West, Mrs. Moore accesses the modern condition and realizes how meaningless life is. Poor woman. show less

Reread-Started as a 5-star, and absolutely remains a 5-star. I have only one nit to pick, and for me that is pretty amazing. Said nit: Why does Cecil suddenly become human, and not just human but certifiably humble, after Lucy shares her reasons for ending the engagement? Okay, back to work. I do not doubt that I will be thinking about this issue all day despite back-to-back meetings that actually require my focused participation. Full rtf

Back for the review --

It is easy to forget E.M. show more Forster was a radical, but he most definitely was. He hung out with Virginia Woolf, he was (obliquely) public about being a homosexual at a time when that was a dangerous choice, he championed gender equality, and he rejected the strictures of upper crust British life in theory if not always in practice. His chafing under societal pressures is so central not just to this book, but to his next, the beautiful Howard's End, and the frustrating and touching Maurice. When I read this in my 20's I don't think I realized how revolutionary some of this was. That may be in part because discussion about the rights of workers and women gets mashed up with overly romantic somewhat nauseating messaging about how love is the answer to all things. Anyway, reading this many years later I was astonished by how ahead of its time much of this was. George says that the future must be one in which men and women are equal. This is really quite shocking. More shocking though is the subtle way in which Forster conveys Mr. Beebe's homosexuality, and hints at Cecil's in the early part of the last century. Most shocking perhaps is Lucy's rejection of money and family to run off and find passion with a socialist aesthete. Could anything have been a more clear rejection of the tenets of 1920's British mores? And Forster makes the reader feel good about all this, casting the horrid Charlotte and the effete Cecil as the exemplars of things proper and English and casting the sweet, shy, depressive George and his loving and defiantly innocent father as the exemplars of modern thinking. How could anyone root for Charlotte and Cecil in that matchup?

I know this is primarily a love story, passion over propriety and all that. I love a love story, but honestly reading this as just a love story it doesn't really do it for me. There is, literally, not a single conversation or interaction between George and Lucy that would indicate why he loves her. It is hormones. At least Cecil loved her for her music. George thought her beautiful most definitely and in need of his protection (to save her from ugliness like the blood covered postcards) but they never exchange any other information. Lucy loves him in part for his awkward decency shown in the ceding of his rooms and their view and the postcard incident, and for his honesty and spontaneity in expressing his feelings, and hormones too. There is something there, but George, no. There is not a lot to root for when boiled down to romance. Luckily the book is so much more than that. It is a wonderful and witty slice of life, it is a call for a new day in England, it is an ode to Forster's beloved Italy, and it is a coming of age story (as regards Lucy.) A joy to (re)read. But yeah, I still don't get how the scales fell from Cecil's eyes. I really want to understand that better. show less

Some emergency teacher I had one day between the ages of twelve and fourteen told the class about a thing called ‘active reading’. From memory, she engaged us in exercises for predicting and anticipating what is ahead and hence we read both faster, and fuller, absorbing more of the text in this way. Now, I’m not sure what kind of prose she based this idea on, but her ideas came back to me while reading Room with a View. But I realised the opposite of what she was saying. I realised show more that predictable sentences and action suggest the book isn’t worth reading. I mean, why do you need to read a book if it sets out to fulfil your expectations? Shouldn’t a book (of some literary credibility) aim to introduce something fresh and new and provide an expansive experience?

I realised then why I toss books aside or glance at pages of new books in a bookshop only to abandon them. And until now I couldn’t put a finger on what it was that made me discard a book quickly – it was the predictability of the author’s writing. I realised too, that this applied as much today to award winning books as it did to books of genre where predictability is intended. Perhaps writing schools teach this sort of thing, to give the reader what they want, that way you satisfy them. And the common denominator of consumer satisfaction is achieved. So, a $25 book can only give you its cover price value. It can't give you any more than that.

I had disregarded EM Forster for years based on how much I didn’t like A Passage to India and how his books were caught up the Merchant-Ivory film experience. (That and he seemed like yet another English toff member of a Bloomsbury group, something I heard about but ignored in my modern literature studies years ago).

I ended up reading A View because I was reading Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance (1860), the book that gave the world the term Renaissance and a book Forster would’ve known. I thought I had read this book years ago, but couldn’t be certain.

But I was wrong about Forster. I love the writing, though, it’s not an easy read, Forster does something interesting with his syntax and the rhythm of his sentences. They are full of detail, building on details and internally and externally allusive. Good writers like Forster keep me going over the sentences and thinking backwards and forwards through the book for its meaning and the possibilities of the destination (or no destination at all). Forster writes unpredictable sentences, takes my reading experience to places I didn’t expect, works language intelligently and dramatically, and offers more than the price of the book sale. So, the book is no candidate for active reading in the sense my teacher tried to teach. But you do need to read with all your senses and an open mind.

A View is expertly structured. Florence first part, rural-suburban England second part. There are doublings and couplings everywhere (a kind of Shakespearian technique). There’s the Miss Alans, the sisters referred to in singular form, though you know there are two. Pairs of travellers – Lucy Honeychurch and her elder cousin, Miss Bartlett, two Emersons, father and son. Two rooms each in the pension Bertolini. Miss Lavish appears as herself in Italy and with a nom de plume in the second part. There are two sides visible in people, the one that polite society thinks of you and the part you actually are. So, Mr Henderson is both a wife murderer in the eyes of the ridiculously opinionated Beebe because he can easily define and categorise a man with a working-class background. On the other hand, Mr Emerson is wise, polite and considered. Lucy Honeychurch is told what to think of him and his son. But she seems capable from the early pages to see more in people. She has a more direct route to understanding people. If only she was left alone to have and explore her own reactions to people. She has a passion stirring in her that we see in her playing of the piano. Perhaps she is the woman emerging from the constraints of Victorian England, too. Though this direct path to her emotions, clearly evident to the reader early on, will be thwarted by class, circumstances and the inability for people to know what they want in the society she grows up in. And Florence has two sides, too. On the one hand it is considered by our English tourists as the place of culture, art, a high point in human development. Yet its people are venal and base (according to these same English), violent (there is a significant murder in a square). And as I recently learned reading Burckhardt, all this high culture of the 15thC was earned after the violent, tyrannical 14thC where individualism was borne off the back violent ascensions to power on the Italian peninsula.

Chapter fifteen is so brilliant, bringing together so many elements of the story, pairing incidents, referencing itself expertly, as the story approaches its comedic resolution. (Not a funny ending, but comedy in the sense of Shakespeare’s comedies where all the elements are brought together in happy conclusion.)

That’s just one little element I noticed in the story. There are many others. A good read. An active read, but not in the way my teacher explained. You want to read a book like this for the depth of its thinking and style. Thankfully, I’ve had the chance to see it for what it is. Like Lucy sees who she loves more clearly (Shakespearean play on words intended).

I have a copy of Where Eagles Fear to Tread on the shelf for the future. show less

The trouble with my generation - and the one that took me so long to read Forster - is that we grew up watching Forster's narrative on screen, may it be Howard's End, A Room with a View or A Passage to India; which I must say, is probably just a tinge of the actual narrative and cannot capture the intended angst of characters, which is abundantly multifarious and cannot be captured accurately by any other medium other than the novel. Forster was right in mentioning that his narrative is show more wider than politics and communal tension in British India.

To me, its about the contrasting standpoints from which an occidental and oriental person proceed to view life in general, and each other in particular; especially so, when the latter is colonized by the former. Forster successfully shows us that a purely humanistic standpoint is not only possible in these circumstances but perhaps the only one that explains life most accurately. In this backdrop, Forster's references to 'oriental pathology' or suspicion in oriental mind as a 'malignant tumour' must not disturb a careful reader because he also talks about the 'English crime' and 'western hypocrisy' in more or less same vain. Its an achievement of epic proportions because it seems humanly impossible to situate one's self in two different Weltanschauungs at the same time. show less