Most helpful customer reviews
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
Homecomings., Nov 2 2008
Most of us connect the notion of "home" or "childhood home" with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox's world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend their vacations, and which, everyone assumes, will pass on to her children when she is dead.
But will it really? Unbeknownst to Ruth's family, the issue is put into question when Ruth forms a friendship with her neighbor-to-be Margaret Schlegel, like Ruth herself from a middle class background but nevertheless separated from Ruth's world by several layers of society and politics: That of the Wilcox is epitomized by pater familias/businessman Henry - rich, conservative and without any sympathy whatsoever for those less fortunate than themselves ("It's all part of the battle of life ... The poor are poor; one is sorry for them, but there it is," Henry Wilcox once comments); while the Schlegels, on the other hand, have just enough income to lead a comfortable life, were brought up by their Aunt Juley, support suffrage (women's right to vote) and surround themselves with actors, "blue-stockings" (feminists), intellectuals and other members of the avantgarde. Further complexity is added when Margaret's sister Helen brings to the Schlegel home Leonard Bast, a poor but idealistic young clerk who loves music, literature and astronomy - and with him, his working class wife Jacky, the embarrassment of having to interact with her, and the even more embarrassing revelation which she has in store for Henry Wilcox; eventually leaving her disillusioned husband to comment that "books aren't real," and that in fact they and music "are for the rich so they don't feel bad after dinner."
An allegory on the question who will ultimately inherit England - the likes of the Wilcox, the Schlegels, or the Basts - E.M. Forster's novel is one of the early 20th century's finest pieces of literature; a masterpiece of social study and character study alike, in which the author brings his protagonists and their environment to life with empathy and a fine eye for detail. The story's strongest character is undoubtedly Margaret Schlegel, a young woman "filled with ... a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encounter[s] in her path through life," as Forster describes her, and whose friendship with Ruth Wilcox, even at the beginning, already brings the two families back together again after Helen has endangered their as-yet tentaive acquaintance by engaging in a near-scandalous affair with Ruth's younger son Paul.
Ultimately, Margaret and Ruth become so close that Ruth eventually decides to give Meg "something worth [her] friendship" - none other than Howards End, a wish that has her panicking family scramble most ungentlemanly for every reason in the book to invalidate the codicil setting forth that bestowal, from its lacking date and signature to the testatrix's state of mind, the ambiguity of the writing's content, the question why Meg should want the house in the first place since she already has one, and the fact that the writing is only in pencil, which "never counts," as Dolly, wife of the Wilcox' elder son Charles is quick to point out, only to be reprimanded by her father in law "from out of his fortress" (Forster) not to "interfere with what you do not understand." And so it is that Meg will only see the house (and be instantly mistaken for Ruth because she has "her way of walking around the house," as the housekeeper explains) when she and her siblings have to look for a new home and Henry Wilcox, who has started to court her after Ruth's death, suggests that the Schlegel's furniture be temporarily stored there - a fateful decision. And while Meg and Henry slowly and painfully learn to adjust to each other, the complexity of their families' relations, and their interactions with the Basts, finally come crashing down on them in a dramatic conclusion.
|
|
|
2.0 out of 5 stars
A 4-star book but a 2-star paperback edition, Feb 3 2003
As fond as I am of this novel I cannot recommend this particular paperback Vintage edition. In a work so meticulous and richly crafted as _Howards End_, it's more than a little jarring to stumble across typos and spelling errors in the text. A handsome and attractive volume, such as we've all come to expect from Vintage, but those typos are really unforgivable. By all means read the book, but opt for a different edition.
|
|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly good, uniquely wise, April 2 2002
I expected Jane Austen and got a very pleasant surprise. Forster uses his characters and their relationships and a launching pad for more philosophical and sociological ruminations. And not in a contrived way, but in the almost intuitive way our own interactions with the people we meet stimulate us, provoke us, and stretch us.
And as far as I know, this book is one of a kind in that it treats people with no imagination with dignity and respect. Most of us are aware there is some kind of division in the world between artists and businessmen, and the division has shown up often enough in literature sure enough. But as all producers of fiction are by necessity on the artist side of the division, businessmen are usually the villains, evil at worst and stupid at best, and artists, are, quite naturally, the heroes. Forster is uniquely wise enough to peer into the enemy camp and see beauty and value.
My feel is that Forster's characterization at times surpasses his writing ability. This is more praise than criticism; his vivid imagination is able to conjure and follow characters that his pen finds difficult to put on the page. They move and live and act in ways he is unable to fully explain or account for. And when was the last time you were able to truly capture all the complexities, intricacies and contradictions of a real person with the rudimentary elements of pen paper and alphabet? That Forster's characters defy characterization may be a contradiction, but in my book it is high praise.
And the way Forster often philosophizes might annoy others, but I do enjoy it. There is a passage early in the book about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that is thinly costumed to make it fit within the frames of the book, I love it for what it is -- a brilliant exposition on a distinct piece of music. --...Some quotes I enjoyed: "It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it." (23) "What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?...Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you were one of these." (112) "England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have molded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?" (138) "The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursion into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility." (153) "Love and Truth-- their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air." (181) "But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul." (219) "She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone." (246)
|
|
|
Most recent customer reviews
|
![Howards End [Blu-ray]](http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/51-WdT%2BgeUL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ James Ivory
by Voltaire
by Robert Louis Stevenson
by Albert Camus
by Mark Wormald
