I’d hated A Passage to India when I read it a few years back, so was a little reluctant to read another Forster book (even though I’d seen and liked the movie of this one). This is why I always give authors a second chance, though…I quite enjoyed this story of the entanglement of three families representing various aspects of the English class system. I particularly appreciated the richness of the characters and the bond between sisters Margaret and Helen. ( )

Telegrams and anger, boo! Only connect, yeah! ( )

I wish I hadn't seen the movie first. I love the movie but I couldn't get the screen imagery out of my head as I was reading and it made the words less fresh ... Or something. ( )

This will not be a positive review; you should know this in advance. I am sure that Howards End is considered in many circles one of the prime examples of British Modernism, that it is one of the landmark works of the Bloomsbury Group, and perhaps one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. All that having been said, I did not enjoy it. So know that now, before you go on.

The plot of the novel concerns three families whose lives intersect in various obvious and not-so-obvious ways. The Wilcoxes are a wealthy family with many houses (including the titular home) and a business-like approach to their wealth. The Schlegels, represented mostly by siblings Margaret and Helen, are comfortably middle-class but very into art and society, and hold proto-socialist beliefs that cause them to think the wealthy (i.e. the Wilcoxes) owe something to the poor. And the Basts, Leonard and Jacky, are, well, the poor. The lives of the families are relatively tangential for the first segment of the book, but when Mrs. Wilcox passes away, Margaret becomes more involved in the lives of the Wilcoxes than any had anticipated.

Perhaps the thing that most distressed me about the novel was how little I felt I was able to identify with the characters. For a long while, I simply believed that it was a consequence of time: that I, the twenty-first-century reader, simply couldn't relate to the twentieth-century motivations of the characters and therefore wouldn't (ironically enough) connect with them. But the other part of the problem is that each character is incredibly stubborn, and the change in each is so hard to detect that I think they feel more like types than fully fleshed-out people. So while you may identify with some of the issues and concerns that come up with them, it's a bit hard to truly, legitimately care.

On the upside, I would have to argue that the novel does get better as it goes along. Once Margaret takes on a more fully invested role in the life of the Wilcox family, Forster is able to send his thematic conflict--the question of what the rich owe to the poor--in motion. And despite the fact that the characters don't exactly change very much, Forster is adept at providing us with the expectation that maybe, just maybe, they will. This suspense drives the novel to its conclusion, which features a surprising twist that seems to come out of nowhere but nevertheless makes sense, and pushes the conflict to a resolution that is surprisingly satisfying.

I suppose my own issues with Howards End are more personal than I should allow in what's supposed to be an objective review. But from the point of development, I felt it was a novel that, much like Margaret and Helen in the early goings, was more invested in ideas than it was in the elements that make a good, readable novel. Leonard Bast, who turns out to be a pretty critical character, feels marginalized throughout, and that doesn't help make it feel as if his class gets its due in the end. Not much, in fact, felt to me like it got its due when the story ended. Perhaps it just wasn't for me. But I guess all the other readers who have loved Howards End can't be wrong, so I'll just have to chalk it up as not being my cup of tea.