In the first book of the second trilogy in the Forsyte Chronicles, Galsworthy gives us Soames in the autumn of his life enduring the Jazz Age. His daughter is now married, flitting about, ‘collecting’ interesting people and filling her home with everything but babies. Life seems to have taken on an unreality after the Great War and the younger generation seems determined not to take anything too seriously. That is unless you are of the lower classes. In The White Monkey the reader is introduced to a cockney couple whose lives are entangled with the Forsytes. ( )

The fourth book of the Forsyte Chronicles (and the first of the trilogy A Modern Comedy) takes the reader to the Twenties, when life has changed a great deal for Soames and for everyone. For all his faults he is upright and honest and I still can't help liking him. It is ironic that his daughter's love life has some similarities to his own: just as he wanted Irene and couldn't have her, Fleur wanted Jon and couldn't have him. But Fleur is much more fortunate than her father because of her marriage to Michael Mont who is devoted to her. Galsworthy has again captured the essence of class and culture in the disillusionment following The Great War, comparing the dire poverty of many without jobs to the shallow frivolity of the wealthy. The title is taken from a painting of a white monkey that Soames gave the Monts for Fleur's Chinese room, a fitting portrayal of the era: a monkey who eats the fruit, discards the peel, without giving a thought to the meaning of life, while staring out at its audience daring them to disagree.

In the interlude, A Silent Wooing, Jon meets Anne Wilmot. The beginning of a new thread in the story. ( )