Forster's cynicism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/13/fromthearchives.classics
visited in November, 2008
Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster reviewed in the
Guardian, August
30 1905
Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM
Forster
William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London
Where Angels Fear to Tread is not at all the kind of book
that its title
suggests. It is not mawkish or sentimental or commonplace.
The motive of the
story, the contest over the possession of a child between
the parent who
survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is
familiar and ordinary
enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are
almost startlingly
original.
EM Forster writes in a persistent vein of cynicism which
is apt to repel,
but the cynicism is not deep-seated. It is a protest
against the worship of
conventionalities, and especially against the
conventionalities of
"refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a
sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real
dramatic force, in a
grotesque tragedy.
There are half-a-dozen characters in the book which
count, and two of them -
Mrs. Herriton, the incarnation of spotless insincerity,
and Harriet, purblind,
heartless, and wholly bereft of the faculty of sympathy -
are altogether
repellent and hence not altogether real. The other four,
whatever else they may
be - and they are all more or less unpleasant - are
undeniably and convincingly
real. It is a trick of Fortune in her most freakish mood
that brings about the
union of Lilis, the vulgar, shallow Englishwoman, and
Gino, the courteous,
shallow, and discreditable Italian.
The results of the trick are at once fantastic and
inevitable. The whole is
a piece of comedy, as comedy is understood by George
Meredith. We wonder
whether EM Forster could be a little more charitable
without losing in force
and originality. An experiment might be worth trying.
|
