A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In the first ten pages, Forster introduces us to everyone (almost) we need to know, and everything we need to know about them, at a dingy pensione dining table in Florence. Two ladies: one young, naive, impulsive, in company with her chaperone, an older, fussy, poorer cousin. An older man – a freethinker, also impulsive, generous, and utterly heedless of decorum, and his son, silent, brooding, and lacking in social skills. A bluestocking “lady novelist,” constantly deriding mere “tourists” and annoying most everyone. And an easy-going, well-intentioned bachelor clergyman. Forster’s economy is breathtaking: characters emerge through what they say, how they say it, and how the first two ladies respond to them, in a piddling discussion of room placement fraught with unintended meanings, offense and puzzlement. The descriptions are wry and sharp; authorial comments skim through like blades, and you might think you were reading Austen – a sly, precise wit, drawing blood without you noticing you’ve been cut. Surely, Patrick Hamilton knew this novel. I wonder.
Described as a “comedy of manners,” “sunny,” “lighthearted…” Well, yes, often. But also something very warm-blooded, earnest, and poignant. Young Lucy, ardent, enthusiastic, but unconfident, knowing she wants something more but not sure what it is or if it’s all right to do so, stumbles into a dazzling spread of blue flowers on a Tuscan hillside, where “violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam.” And the affable clergyman remarks later that it was in Italy that she evinced “the sense that she had found wings, and meant to use them.” There begin the complications, and an ill-advised engagement between Lucy and the chilly snob Cecil. But even Cecil is no cartoon: he is difficult, ignorant, overbearing, and… he can’t help who he is, and is at his best when vanquished.
A marvelous exploration of men and women, their foibles and strengths, their comedies and tragedies, taking their weak and noble ways through a beautiful, complicated world.
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