"Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King

This is the story of the biggest dome in the world, the dome on the Duomo (the 'House of God', the cathedral) in Florence and the man who built it, without internal scaffolding, defying all expectations and critics, when no one knew how it could be built.

My wonderful wife, Steph, and I went to Florence this year; above is my picture of the Duomo showing Brunelleschi's dome. Now that I have read the book I want to go back to see it again; now I understand what is so incredible about the construction. Mind you, now that I understand more about the unorthodox details of the construction and I know how heavy just the lantern on top of the dome is, I am not sure I want to clamber up into the roof space and stare out from the lantern at the rooftops of Florence. Scary!

There is a lot in the book that I didn't properly understand. There were a lot of technical challenges to overcome. Just hoisting massive blocks of stone to the required height was difficult with the technology of the day (the main system was powered by an ox trudging round and round and there was a complicated system of gears including a type of clutch so that stuff could also be lowered while the ox trudged in the same direction). It was difficult to understand how the mason's could reach the overhanging bricks they were building. The problem with a dome or an arch is that it isn't really stable until the keystone is put in at the end; this is why arches are usually built on top of a wooden construction which is then taken away when the arch is finished. Brunelleschi didn't do this (it would have taken too long to source all that wood). How did they build it without it falling down? The other problem is that a dome converts the downward weight of the roof into an outwards thrust which is usually countered using buttresses. Brunelleschi used no buttresses. Instead he used circular rings of stone like coopers use iron staves around barrels. I still didn't really understand.

Not only does the book fascinate with the details of the unprecedented construction but it also has brilliant vignettes of Florentine life. There is a wonderful story about Brunelleschi playing a practical joke on a carpenter to convince him that he had swapped identity for 24 hours with someone else. The bemused carpenter ended up leaving Florence and making his fortune in Hungary. Time and again, King provided wonderful details and I wanted to know how he could find out so much about a time so long ago. 

In every way this book was brilliant. This year I have also read Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper which was also excellent. These two books are both among my top five non-fiction for 2014 and I shall definitely seek out more by this brilliant author.

December 2014; 167 pages

I have now also read the wonderful and brilliant The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies in the chaos of the Franco-Prussian war, the Siege of Paris and the Commune of Paris, Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and many more.

"The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole

Pretending to be the translation of an Italian story from the time of the crusades, The Castle of Otranto is a classic gothic horror story, complete with castle, a secret underground passage, a giant, long-lost noblemen, a holy friar, a curse and even a skeleton dressed as a monk. Starting ludicrously with Manfred's only son and heir being dashed to pieces by a giant helmet whilst crossing the castle courtyard on the way to his wedding, the tension mounts and the realistic passages, especially the wonderfully comic maid Bianca, so that by the end one forgives the dream-like element.

There were lots of Shakespearean overtones. The complicated love situations, pitting aristocratic arranged matches against love at first sight, together with the meddling 'holy' friar, reminded me of Romeo and Juliet while there are clear tributes to Hamlet and Macbeth. The clowning of the rustics is also a Shakespearean touch.

The silliest part of the story is the one in which best friends Matilda and Isabella both lust after Theodore, the clean cut young peasant. There is the chance of a significant amount of dramatic tension but Walpole throws it away after two pages when Isabella agrees to resign her hopes to her friend. Neither of them suggest that Theodore might want a say in the matter!

The whole idea of a suitor being good enough because he was born a nobleman even though he is a peasant (actually worse, he is a vagrant) is daft to our modern ears but they believed in it them. Blood will out. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a story based on this premise.

It was interesting to read the long passages of dialogue in which the characters take turns to speak with no quotation marks and no separation of different voices into separate paragraphs. Bianca has brilliant dialogue; the others are too much like one another.

There is indeed very little characterisation. The noble princesses and Theodore and noble and pure and insipid. Bianca is brilliant. Father Jerome and Lord Frederic are weak. The only decent character, in a role tailor made for Alan Rickman, is the evil Manfred whose wicked designs are frustrated at every turn to his obvious impatience and frustration.

The sins of the father are visited upon the children.

It may be a silly story but it gave birth to a genre. December 2014; 115 pages

It is strange that this classic Gothic story, written in 1764, was based in Italy whilst The Monk (1796) was based in Spain. Gothic is supposed to be Germanic. In fact, both books are ways of bashing Roman Catholicism.

Other books with Castle in the title include:

• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• The Castle by Franz Kafka
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
• I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill
• The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton
• Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgworth
• In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner (literary criticism)
• Hatter's Castle by A J Cronin

"A Question of Belief" by Donna Leon

An Italian-based police procedural murder mystery set in Venice. Commisario Brunetti is that rarity among detectives, a happily married cop. His wife, daughter of a Count, is a university lecturer on English Literature and the Commisario reads Marcus Aurelius and Tacitus. In the August heat wave, dreaming of going with his family to the still-snowy mountains where he will have to wear a cardigan, he investigates his Inspector's aunt who is busily paying huge sums of money to a fraudulent faith healer and a civil servant who seems to be involved in making the wheels of justice run even slower for a really cheap rent on his palatial Venetian apartment. Then the civil servant is brutally murdered.

Beautifully written, with great regard for local geography and local characters and a clear feeling for the ambiguous way in which Italians view the law, Leon's novel is utterly routed in the drama of the everyday.

December 2014; 262 pages

Our iceberg is melting" by John Kotter

This is a fable about a colony of penguins who discover that their iceberg is melting. They have to decide what to do next. The purpose of the story is to illustrate the eight necessary steps in change management.

(It is probably just as well that the story isn't about how to deal with global climate change because the penguins' solution is to move to another iceberg and it seems unlikely that hmans will be able to move to another planet some time soon.)

There are setbacks and barriers along the way but the five strong team of Louis, Head Penguin; Alice, pushiest penguin Fred, young creative genius the Professor; and Buddy, hunkiest penguin succeed over the nay-sayers led by Nono.

It's cure and it's a fable and it illustrates how to approach a change.
December 2014; 137 pages

"Smoke" by Ivan Turgenev

Waiting to meet his fiancée in Baden-Baden, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov encounters his first love, Irina, a woman who abandoned him because she was poor and she had a financially better offer. The two of them fall back in love. But this means that Litvinov must betray his fiancee. And after all, can he trust Irina this time after what she did last time?

An interesting short story which perhaps suffers from being extended even to this barely more than a novella length.

And it is difficult to read a book where almost every page has a foreign phrase or obscure reference which can only be understood by looking up the notes at the back. It certainly disrupts the flow!

Good but nothing to compare with Fathers and Sons. 

December 2014; 184 pages

"Blood at the Bookies" by Simon Brett

This is a classic whodunnit by Simon Brett who has also authored the Charles Paris theatricality themed murder mysteries.

Two very different single ladies, plump holistic masseuse and therapist Jude and self-reliant retired Home Office civil servant Carole, are neighbours in the murder-infested town of Fethering on the south coast. Jude, who likes a bit of a flutter, is in the town bookies when polish immigrant Tadeusz comes in, looks around and leaves. She notices blood and follows him in time to catch his dying word: Fifi.

Jude and Carole, once the latter has recovered from flu, investigate. The wonderful cast of characters includes racist ex-stand-up-comedian-turned-pub-landlord Ted, racist ex-Carthusian estate agent Ewan and his downtrodden son Hamish and gorgeous singing daughter Sophia, Zosia, the sister of Tadeusz, ex-bookie 'Perfectly' Frank, gambling addict Mel, and serial adulterer Drama lecturer Andy.

A thoroughly enjoyable and well-written puzzle which I guessed well before the end but which had sufficient twists to keep me wondering whether I was right.

I'd love to read more of this series.

I have now read: The Corpse on the Court and Bones Under the Beach Hut which also star Carole and Jude, and some of the Charles Paris theatrical whodunnits such as A Decent Interval.  And the prolific Brett has also written a series in which murder mystery meets P G Wodehouse in outrageously extravagant style: Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera.

December 2014; 339 pages

"The Victim" by Saul Bellow

Asa Leventhal works as a journalist on a trade paper in just post-war New York. It is very hot. His wife is away, helping her mother to move house. He get a call from his brother's wife (his brother is working away) about her very sick son and he has to trek across the city to help. Then, in the park, he meets a man he knew years ago who explains that Asa ruined his life.

The dialogue reminds me of Beckett, it is stilted and sometimes you get the feeling that neither character is actually talking to the other but rather that they are both rehearsing their own anxieties. But the matter-of-fact way in which the stranger, Albee, insinuates himself into Leventhal's life, trading on Leventhal's guilt and good will, and the way in which this relationship changes the way that Leventhal acts to others, making him paranoid and angry, is like a Pinter play. Add in the nightmarish quality of the setting, New York in a heat wave, full of dark and shadows, but at the same time rooted in mundane reality, everyday and banal, is pure Kafka.

An Anerican classic. December 2014; 264 pages

"Martin Chuzzlewit" by Charles Dickens

The sixth of the 15 novels of Dickens and the last of the early series, Martin Chuzzlewit had disappointing sales for a novelist who had burst on the scene with Pickwick and Oliver Twist. Martin Chuzzlewit, rather like Nicholas Nickleby, is a picaresque novel. The moral message is that money taints. Old Martin, grandfather of the eponymous hero, is rich and all his relatives are jockeying to become heir to his fortune. As a result he despises them and does not know whom to trust. So he has brought up an orphan who knows she will inherit nothing and who is his disinterested companion; when he discovers that she and Martin are in love he suspects his grandson of trying to worm his own way into the will and so he cuts him off without a penny. So Martin goes off to find his fortune in America.

The portrait of America, eternally boasting of their freedom whilst glorying in slavery (Chuzzlewit was written in 1843, almost twenty years before the American Civil War), and full of gluttons and sharks who will do their very best to fleece every one they can, must have damned Dickens in the USA. There is only one good American who eventually lends Martin the money he needs to escape back to England.

In terms of the book, the sojourn in America is a good chance for Dickens to be at his most bitingly sarcastic but does nothing to feed the plot except to bring Martin to his lowest point and, upon redemption, to rid him of his selfishness. As a consequence, Dickens has to keep the action moving back and forth across the Atlantic so that the main focus of the story becomes the behaviour of Jonas Chuzzlewit, nephew to old Martin, who comes into his own inheritance when his own father dies, marries, becomes a wife-batterer, and then falls in with a fraudulent insurance company.

In many ways this novel is classic Dickens. There are tremendous descriptive passages which can go on for pages with metaphor upon extended metaphor. These really slow the action down, especially in the vulnerable early part of the book. Later on there are some utterly cringing declarations of love and purity. Dickens really couldn't see a pudding without over-egging it. And he really couldn't do 'show don't tell'. We know from page one that Pecksniff is a hypocrite because Dickens tells us. And of course Pecksniff has no redeeming features. We know straight away that Tom Pinch is a saint because Dickens tells us. And Tom has no faults. Even the characters who change, Martin and Mercy, scarcely change. And you have to feel sorry for Charity not just because her marital ambitions are multiply thwarted but because Dickens so clearly revels in thios, seeing it as just punishment for her crime which is basically being Pecksniff's daughter. The other daughter, Mercy, also comes off worst.

So the book is full of the faults of Dickens. But it is also full of his strengths. There are some brilliant characters:

• Pecksniff himself, the self-righteous hypocrite who is so brilliantly adept at always being found accidentally in possession of the moral high ground.
• Mark Tapley, a bit of a clone of Sam Weller, who is irrepressibly jolly and so decides that in order to gain moral credit he has to put himself into the worst possible situation so that his natural optimism is tested in as hot a furnace as possible.
• Sairey Gamp, the alcoholic nurse, who holds monologues of breathtaking brilliance which purport to be dialogues between herself and 'Mrs Harris' but which always show Sairey herself in the best possible light.
• Mercy (Merry) Pecksniff who persuades Jonas to court her by the stratagem of always putting him down and calling him 'that fright'.
• Bailey Junior, a bit of a bit part, but one of the cheeky young cockney boys in whom Dickens excelled.
• Montague Tigg, the shady financier.
• Jonas Chuzzlewit, a baddy in the Alan Rickman mould, whose downfall is a rather neat piece of irony.

But there are others who are there merely to help get the lead characters out of difficult situations and to resolve the story. Old Martin and John Westlock are the most obvious.

If there is one thing I would learn from this novel it is the comic brilliance of Mrs Gamp.

Huge. Could be cut down to 300 pages without missing much. But plenty of fun and some great Dickensian characters and dialogue. December 2014; 837 pages.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The clashing rocks" by Ian Serraillier

This is a retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. They brave adventures to sail to Colchis in the Black Sea (the first Greek fleet to enter the Black Sea through the eponymous clashing rocks) to recapture the famous Golden Fleece. But they need the help of witch Medea who falls in love with Jason and requires him to mary her as the price of her help. But part of her help involves the murder of her brother. Later when Jason is safely back home Medea poisons his uncle the King which revolts the people and means that Jason and Medea need to flee. Finally in exile Medea kills two of Jason's children and leaves him.

Which is perhaps the most distressing story in the whole of the Greek pantheon (although the Oresteiad) is perhaps as dark.

It was simply told by Serraillier. He added very little although there were little touches to add reality to such things as Medea's love and the way ordinary people reacted to the tale. But it is still mostly a bald myth.

"Carrie's War" by Nina Bawden

Widowed Carrie takes her children back to the Welsh village where she lived as a wartime evacuee. The first chapter contains a classic teaser in which we learn that Carrie did something awful, the worst thing she ever did. The second chapter then goes back to her arrival with her brother as evacuees.

We meet mean Mr Evans the grocer who is very chapel and strict and his sister Louise who is scared of him and of her own shadow. Things are grim until Carrie and Nick are sent to get a Christmas goose from the farm owns by the estranged sister of Mr Evans. There they meet Hepzibah the cook and Mister Johnny who is a little slow and fellow evacuee Albert Sandwich. This is a magical world with scary creatures in it and enchanting creatures. Carrie is easily able to mix up bad and good; she is ruled by her impulsive heart and her perceptions are usually wrong. In contrast ten year old Nick is wise beyond his years.

The final chapter reverts back to the present but the magic hasn't finished.

A classic kids story with a beautiful construction and some wonderfully three dimensional characters.

November 2014; 159 pages

"Lila" by Robert M Pirsig

I first read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my second year as an undergraduate at Cambridge; I was studying the History of Philosophy of Science so it was perfect timing. I found the book unbelievably brilliant. It is about a narrator on a motorcycle trip with his son Chris, travelling across America. As he travels he remembers his past life as a person he calls Phaedrus who was a lecturer and  student at University, a period which led to his discovery of a new concept in philosophy and to his nervous breakdown. The concept is Quality. When we look at a work of Art, he argues, we can see whether it has Quality or not. This Quality does not reside in the Object but in our Subjective response to it; at the same time it cannot be purely Subjective because there is a wide inter-personal agreement as to what great Art is. Therefore Quality is found in the interaction between a Subject and an Object.

Now in Lila, Phaedrus is a famous author who is sailing a boat from the Great Lakes to Florida. He picks up Lila in a bar; they have sex and she joins him on his journey. But his friend Richard Rigel, who knew Lila in the past, warns him to keep away and asks, in an attack on Phaedrus and his book, whether Lila has Quality. Yes, replies Phaedrus, but he then spends most of the next few days, sailing down to New York with Lila, whether she does or not.  This then leads him to develop his Metaphysics of Quality.

Sequels can rarely live up to the original. Zen and the Art is probably my favourite book ever so Lila didn't really have a chance. After the initial shiver up my spine when I encountered the magic name Phaedrus on the third page, I realised that there was a certain amount of sameness: a journey across America while the narrator spouts philosophy. While the concept of Quality was liberating the development of the Metaphysics of Quality seemed rather laboured and sometimes a little silly.

However, there are passages in the book where the story takes over, and there was genuine dramatic tension here. Furthermore, there were innumerable insights along the way which made the philosophy full of sparkles even if it did not convince as a system. Regrettably the end was rather weak (whilst the end of Zen and the Art is stunning).

A good book, worth reading for the philosophical insight, but it was inevitably unable to live up to the magic promise of its progenitor.

November 2014; 443 pages

"The Lambs of London" by Peter Ackroyd

Some of Ackroyd's books are wonderful (Hawksmoor and his biographies of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens); I struggle with others. This novel avoids the time shifting and mysticism of The House of Doctor Dee and tells a straightforward tale (based on historical fact) ) of literary forgery; a theme he has previously covered in Chatterton. William Henry Ireland, to please his bookseller father, 'discovers' papers in Shakespeare's hand including fragments of poetry, a love letter to Anne Hathaway complete with a lock of hair, and a missing play, Vortigern. As he grows bolder, the doubts about the authenticity of his forgeries grows; Ackroyd provides some beautifully subtle dialogue which hints the the speaker has doubts while never making it obvious.

This story is interwoven with the equally true story of Mary Lamb who lives with brother Charles and, stifled by the limits imposed upon her by her mother, goes mad.

So the theme of the book is the irrational responses of children to the expectations created by their parents: R. D. Laing would have loved the argument.

The book is carefully written. Mary's father suffers from dementia and makes comments from time to time which sometimes seem to be full of wisdom but this reader was always unsure whether or not they referred to the action of the novel, or the subtext, or neither. This left me somewhat unsettled which was probably eactly what the author intended. There were occasions when he seemed to quote from other books that had not been written at the time of the action, so this was even more interesting. Mary's mother is wonderful for inserting the mundane into dialogue ("Tizzy! More hot water.") which keeps conversations from getting too serious, makes them seem more realistic and emphasises her role as the guardian of the everyday which is exactly what is driving Mary mad. And when Actor-Manager Sheridan turns up he is the model of a thespian, a practitioner, sir, of the sacred art which belongs to the muses Thalia and Melpomene.

This was an easy to read and very enjoyable entertainment. November 2014; 216 pages

Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction

• The Clerkenwell Tales
• Chatterton
• The House of Doctor Dee
• The Lambs of London
• Milton in America
• The Fall of Troy

Biography

• Wilkie Collins
• Blake

"Therese Raquin" by Emile Zola

I saw the play of Therese Raquin recently at Malvern Theatre with the inimitable Alison Steadman as the older Madame Raquin. The play was brilliant, bringing alive the characters: Mme Raquin domineering, first turning Camille into a weak-willed invalid whose attempts at being a man lead to spiteful bullying and insisting that wild-child Therese marries him. The affair between Laurent and Therese is inevitable. The bit parts were also well done, particularly the stupid and insensitive Grivet.

In the play there are moments of sheer horror as the ghost of Camille rises from the bed and marches in and out of the room.

I was sceptical how the book would do the haunting scenes, given that Zola was an exponent of realism. And he carries it off! Everything is, or could be, in the imagination of the two murderers. Indeed, the book is a deep analysis of the psychology of two people who conceive of killing, who carry it out and who are then tormented by their guilt. Their uncontrollable passion for having sex with one another disappears as soon as Camille is dead. By the end, when they are married, they tear one another to pieces. He batters her and she sleeps around.

This book has the usual overwriting of the Victorians and is always inches away from melodrama. But it is compelling and its characters are believable. It chronicles the step by step degradation this is the consequence of sin. And Zola was an atheist!

Superb. November 2014; 194 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev

This delightful book starts with Arkady taking his hero, nihilist medical student Bazanov, home to meet his doting father who has a small estate where the serfs have recently been freed and are supposed to pay rent. Once home, Arkady discovers that he has a baby half-brother: his father has impregnated a servant girl who is scandalously living in the house but they are not yet married. Bazanov pursues his scientific hobbies, mostly dissecting frogs, and angers Arkady's elegant ex-roue uncle with his politics. After a while the pair go to visit friends and stay with widow Anna and her sister Katya. Bazanov falls in love with Anna who rejects him and they go off to Bazanov's equally doting father. Bazanov hates being back at home: he is embarrassed by his parents although his father is always telling his mother to cool her ardour for the boy. So they go back to Arkady's house.

This is a brilliant book. The characters come alive through their dialogue: I particularly loved Bazanov who spouts his nihilist rubbish and scarcely takes a breath. It is especially brilliant because no character is quite what it seems. The contradictions within Bazanov's philosophy are clear from the start, sometimes subtly inherent in what he says and sometimes pointed out by one of the other characters, especially the devoted disciple Arkady who ends up getting quite fed up with his friend. But other characters have quirks. Uncle Piotr is the ultimate bachelor, elegant and polite, but he once trailed round Europe with his lover. Arkady's rather wimpish Papa has a new child. Arkady's love affair with Katya is a matter of slow and gentle discovery; Arkady is at first in love with Anna and it is only gradually, without him being aware (though the reader is) that his easy friendship with Katya blossoms into something more. His hesitant proposal is a masterpiece.

This is a brilliant book and really short (for a Russian novel!) and easy to read. A fabulous master-class in the art of writing characters.

November 2014; 224 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Last Tycoon" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the last and unfinished novel by FSF and it is a sympathetic portrait of movie mogul Monroe Stahr who is the chief executive of a paternalistic film studio in Hollywood. Stahr is hard working and focussed on churning out a new movie every eight days but at the same time he is dedicated to developing talent and developing this new art form. By accident, during an earthquake, Stahr meets a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: they embark on a romantic love affair even though she is about to get married.

The book is narrated by Celia, the daughter of Stahr's partner in the studio, who has a crush on Stahr and wants to make love to him while he just sees her as his partner's daughter. It swings in and out of the first person. Stahr is portrayed as compellingly human behind the move facade.

One particular feature of the book, which is a first draft and includes some errors and inconsistencies, is the way Fitzgerald wove real movie actors and film people in and out of the story. This gives the book extra verisimilitude.

Fitzgerald is very touching when he takes Stahr and Kathleen and moves them from strangers to lovers. The dialogue hints at unknown back stories which will inevitably complicate their romance. What they do is normal, yet they are moving closer together, yet there is nothing inevitable about what happens until the final moments. This was beautifully and delicately handled.

But my favourite scene is the one where Stahr is teaching a writer how to write for the movies and I imagine this must have been based on a personal experience of Fitzgerald's. Stahr diagnoses that the reason that the writer is disaffected is that he somehow sees movie scripting as unworthy because he sees movies as being mass-produced assembly-line creations which own everything to cliche and nothing to art. The writer wants to have melodrama everywhere. Stahr then paints a word picture of a movie scene:

"Suppose you're in your office .... A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her - idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table .... She has two dimes and a nickel - and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match by the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window - but just then your telephone rings. The girls picks it up, says hello - listens - and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' ....

What a start to a story. Proof that movies can be as great an art form as novels. Later in the book the writer, who still feels this is all beneath him, is taken by Stahr into a meeting where the writing teams on another movie have got stuck and he starts to sort it out.

I loved this book! (Although the synopsis of what Fitzgerald planned for the rest of it made me shout out: "No, that isn't how this develops!"

Fitzgerald also wrote The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

October 2014; 169 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Frenchman's Creek" by Daphne Du Maurier

If you're going to write slushy romantic fiction, write well and write hard. This is the ultimate. Set during the Restoration (romantic enough already!) this is the tale of a headstrong lady escaping from her husband to live on her Cornish estate. She encounters a French (of course) pirate and she falls in love. But the local gentility  are searching for the pirate and the noose is tightening.

Classic and very enjoyable. October 2014; 253 pages

"The Lady of the Camellias" by Alexandre Dumas (fils)

Marguerite is a courtesan. Every day she carries a bouquet of Camellias. Twenty five days of the month they are white, five days they are red. She goes to the theatre and mixes with Dukes and Counts. She lives a high lifestyle funded by her lovers. Then she meets Armand.

And falls in love. But he isn't rich. He cannot keep he in the style to which she is accustomed. At first she continues with her life and he tries to rationalise it that it is like having an affair with a married woman; he has to accept that she sleeps with other men. But their love is strong so they retire to the countryside and set up house together. Secretly she sells her horses and pawns her jewels so that they can afford to live. Armand assigns the income from the inheritance he got from his mother to Marguerite. Armand's father is not best pleased.

The books starts slowly at first with the framing story of the narrator who attends the auction of the dead courtesan's possessions and then meets Armand. Armand then tells the narrator his story. So it starts slowly twice over because after the auction and the mystery of finding Armand we have to go through the slow build up of Armand's meeting Marguerite and falling in love. But once they have set up house together and we know that they cannot live happily ever after because of her past, because of his poverty, because of her extravagance, because of his father; because of all of these pressures the tale then moves inexorably to its doomed outcome. In this part it becomes very compelling indeed.

Written by the son of the man who wrote the Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, this book became the inspiration for Verdi's opera La Traviata.

Brilliant. October 2014; 206 pages

"Maurice" by E M Forster

Maurice is from the suburbs, from the upper middle classes (dead daddy was a stockbroker), not very bright but very snobbish. He's also gay. This book, written in 1914 but not published until after Forster's death in 1970 (three years after homosexuality was legalised) follows him through Cambridge where his initial passion for the rather more intelligent (and upper class) Clive turns into a three year unconsummated love affair, into a physical relationship with a servant. Lust for the lower classes leads to such self-disgust that he seeks medical advice to cure him of his inversion. Will he accept his true nature or will he live a life of self-denial?

What I especially loved about this book, apart from the usual light touch prose and dialogue at which Forster excels (as in Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Passage to India, and Howards End), is the way the characters leap out of their stereotypes. I love the utterly unsympathetic character of Maurice with his stupidity, his suburbanity, and his petty tyrannies over his mother and sisters. I love the servant Alec who, after their initial encounter, tries to lure Maurice back and when that fails (Maurice fears blackmail) threatens him thus realising Maurice's fears. The two of them are beastly to one another and this leads directly to (one presumes) a night of wild passion. Forster knows human beings so well that he can make the reader see their motivations underneath their contradictions.

Even as I was thoroughly disliking the nasty Maurice I was hoping that he would be true to himself and find fulfilment. This is how good Forster is.

October 2014; 218 pages

"Intimacy" by Hanif Kureishi

Jay, an author, has decided to leave his wife and his two sons in the morning. This is the story of the night before.

Why is he leaving? He has been having an affair with another woman but she has left him. One of his friends is happily married and condemns Jay's plans. One of his friends is unhappily separated from his wife and this has caused one of his sons serious psychological damage. Jay loves his little sons. They love him and trust him absolutely. He knows that what he is planning will hurt them.

I was shouting at the book: don't be a fool. Don't leave.

The long night moved remorselessly on to the dreaded conclusion.

Sometimes I found this book so hard to read. It is so honest, so intimate, so searingly sad that I wanted to hide it where I could never find it again. It was a trauma to read it.

Stunning writing.

October 2014; 155 pages

"Capital" by John Lanchester

This book chronicles a year in the live of some of the people who live in, or are connected to, Pepys Road, a London street where the property prices dwarf anything that anyone can actually earn.

There is the Pakistani shopkeeper, his wife and children and his two Moslem brothers who are expecting a visit from their formidable mother. There is the city banker who needs a Christmas bonus of a million pounds to make ends meet because of the extravagance of his wife and the lifestyle they have evolved; they help to pay for a Hungarian nanny and a Polish builder. There is the old lady who is feeling unwell, her daughter and her grandson who is a famously anonymous artist. There is the million pound new soccer signing from Senegal, a seventeen year old wizard and his dad. And there is the Zimbabwean asylum seeker who has an illegal job as a traffic warden.

The plot revolves around the delivery of postcards saying 'We want what you have' and the consequences. As such it is a trivial plot device; I was much more interested in the details of the lives of the characters which were quite enough to carry the story on their own.

The author explicitly tells you back story and thoughts of each character; there are no surprises. This was 'tell, don't show' with a vengeance. And yet it very quickly got me engrossed in the stories. I really wanted to know what happened next. There weren't many surprises, but in each case there was plot development and many characters developed too. It was simply written but it worked very well.

Beware assistants!

This was a three part BBC TV series in November to December 2015.

A good read. October 2014; 577 pages.

"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" by Charles Dickens

View of Rochester Cathedral

This is the last and unfinished novel by Charles Dickens and the only disappointing thing about it is that it is unfinished. Although there are moments of classic Dickens sentiment and he has a deplorable tendency to tell you the innermost thoughts of some of his characters, the book stands up with a strong plot and some wonderful characters:

• John Jasper the opium-smoking choir master and uncle of Edwin
• Twins Helena and Neville Landless, the latter being the prime suspect for the murder of Edwin, if indeed he has been murdered
• Edwin's guardian Mr Grewgious, living a lonely bachelor life in Chambers
• The pompous Mayor of Cloisterham, Mr Sapsea, who can't even write an epitaph to his wife without boasting about himself
• Opium seller Princess Puffer
• The Philanthropist and bully Mr Honeythunder
• Detective Dick Datchery
• Ex sailor Mr Tartar who befriends Neville and Rosa and was Mr Crisparkle's fag at school; his house is ship-shape and Bristol fashion
• Durdles the stonemason who rather likes a drop of liquor
• Deputy the urchin who is employed by Durdles to throw stones at him is he sees him out after 10PM and thus drive him home
• Combative landlady Billickin

It is a brilliant start and I would love to see it completed.

October 2014; 304 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Reengineering the corporation" by Michael Hammer and James Champy

This supposed classic, updated in 2001, is rather disappointing. Its big idea is that businesses processes that are broke need fixing (sometimes even before they are recognisedly broke). But the fixing cannot be little incremental tweaks, it must be radical.

The way in which their success stories have reengineered has been (a) to move away from the fracturing of tasks that characterised the Adam Smith division of labour and Henry Ford's assembly line production and (b) to use information technology. The authors are at pains to point out that the use of IT by itself will not revolutionise businesses but it is equally clear that none of the proposals they make could succeed without IT.

Another idea is that they have to consider customer satisfaction because nowadays customers demand almost personalised choice.

They also point out that a company is people. However, many of their success stories involve sometimes significant down-sizing. They get angry about workers resisting change suggesting that many businesses cannot survive without their radical reengineering proposals but they fail to see that the workers facing redundancy may prefer a few more years of staggering on before the business goes bust to immediate dismissal.

I did like their characterisation of a hierarchy as being inherently resistant to change: "For an idea to win acceptance, everyone along the way must say yes, but killing an idea requires only one no."

One of their solutions relies on the fact, probably true, that the vast majority of customer requests are effectively the same so that a small number of standardised processes can cope with them. In other words, a process triage can divert 95% of tasks to be done quickly by cheap less trained staff using standard templates or scripts and then send the remaining 5% to the specialists. Therefore part of reengineering involves creating standard process templates for workers to use.

I liked the following quote: "To understand what is being changed a team needs insiders; but to change it, a team needs a disruptive elements. These are the outsiders."

Another idea they include is benchmarking. In fact they have included a lot of ideas all of which I have encountered elsewhere. But they claim that only when all these ideas are put together in the reengineering package will years achieve the radical improvements they are touting.

I was confused by this quote on page 195. "There is no guesswork or subjectivity involved in deciding these rewards [performance pay bonuses]. They are based on subjective measures."

Overall this book contained a few ideas I had met before packaged together. There was a lot of padding. In particular the three new chapters which are detailed case studies of three companies. These were unnecessary but without them I guess they couldn't have sold another book.

September 2014; 246 pages.

"Howards End" by E. M. Forster

This novel combines feather-light Jane Austen style drawing room comedy with a biting social commentary in a beautifully-paced plot which travels inexorably towards tragedy ... and a happy ending.

The Schlegels are two sisters and a brother of independent means whose essentially frivolous lives are redeemed by a clear understanding that they are privileged and that the underprivileged who support them lead lives of struggle. Sometimes clumsily, but always with the best intentions, they try to better the lot of the poor.

They interact with the Wilcoxes. Mr Wilcox is a businessman whose fortune comes from West Africa. As a self-made man he is convinced that those who have not made it are poor through their own failures. He uses and abuses the people who work for him and his son, George, does so even more. Only his wife, who is the old money owner of Howards End, is a spiritual Schlegel.

At first sight, it is difficult to see why Howards End is regarded as a classic. Written in 1910, with Modernism round the corner and Henry James already showing the way, it remains in its style resolutely Victorian, adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, in the past tense, with the author from time to time addressing the reader directly, a technique which, while it adds the suggestion of verisimilitude, as if this was a history rather than fiction, interrupts the narrative and distances the characters from the reader.

• “I hope that it will not set the reader against her” (Ch 2)
• “Our hero and heroine were married. They have weathered the storm and may reasonably expect peace.” (Ch 31)

Perhaps this old-fashioned elegance is what appeals to the bulk of today’s readers: it is certainly easier than Modernist fiction and there is a nostalgic cultural presupposition in England that the pinnacle of the novel is represented by Austen and the Brontes, Dickens and Eliot and even, God help us, the dreadful Trollope.

The plot is pretty Victorian too, driven by improbable coincidences, from the Wilcoxes moving to London to be neighbours with the Schlegels to Leonard’s wife playing a key role in the denouement. But the plot is not the point. It is clear that Forster started with his themes and then developed the understory, on which the plot is built, and the characters who are created from archetypes. But Forster’s skill lies in making the reader believe in the possibility of the story and the reality of the characters.

Forster himself, in his Aspects of the Novel, divided fictional characters into ‘rounded’ and ‘flat’: flat characters can be expressed in a single sentence, they never surprise the reader, and so they are memorable which means they never need reintroducing. On these criteria, Margaret and Henry and perhaps Leonard are the only fully-rounded characters.

But this doesn’t necessarily matter. Forster points out almost all Dickens characters are flat and they are memorable caricatures. For me, the test of a compelling character is whether the reader treats them as if they were real. In a discussion with my U3A English Novel group, I expressed surprise that Henry proposed to Margaret (and even more that she accepted him) and I was told that he proposed because he wanted to be looked after in his old age, that he had thought Evie his daughter would fulfil this role but that she had decided to get married and so he had proposed to Margaret, a much younger woman who could be expected to survive him. She, in turn, accepted him because she was afraid she would be left on the shelf. In other words, my fellow readers, all educated, well-read and cultured Schlegel types, believed sufficiently in these characters to treat them as real. Of course, Margaret and Henry are ‘rounded’ characters (and the fact that I found their marriage surprising proves this), but my fellow readers also believed in Jacky enough to construct her future after the end of the book: she would go back ‘on the game’ now that Leonard was dead.

My opinion, as an author, is that the characters dance to the themes of the book. Charles, for example, is a classic flat character. Even more narrow-minded than his father, he is created to be a representation of the unacceptable face of capitalism (as seen by Forster in its colonial and imperialist aspect), triumphant and unbridled, and, as such, to be the one who goes too far at the denouement; it is his downfall that provokes the ending. Helen’s role is to represent feeling unrestrained by reason (I wonder whether Forster was inspired to create Helen and Margaret from the Dashwood sisters Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility; Jane Austen was one of Forster’s favourite authors) and she does this both to kickstart the story and to enable the end.

The key characters are:

Margaret Schlegel: the principal protagonist. Despite being firmly on the side of feelings, art and culture, she recognises that these things are not possible without commerce, as when she defends her proposed marriage to Henry: “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No - perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.” (Ch 19)

Margaret is connection personified, “The rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.” (Ch 22) (This brings to mind Bifrost, the rainbow bridge between Asgard, home of the Gods, and Midgard, the human world, in Norse mythology. Near Howards End are the Six Hills “tombs of warriors, breasts of the spring”. Howards End and its original, Rooks Nest House, E M Forster’s childhood home, are in Hertfordshire close to the boundary between Wessex and the Danelaw, negotiated by Alfred the Great and Guthrun in c879. Of course the Germanic Schlegels and their Anglo-Saxon in-laws all come from cultures that once worshipped Odin/Wotan and his fellow gods. More connections?)

Her marriage to Henry, even after she has discovered that he has been unfaithful to Ruth, is prompted by a feeling that she can improve him: “Henry must have it as he liked, for she loved him, and some day she would use her love to make him a better man.” (Ch 28)

Henry Wilcox: Often portrayed as the villain, Henry is a fiendishly complex character. Yes, he’s a businessman making money out of England’s Empire and colonies. Yes, he’s a capitalist who “goes about saying that personal actions count for nothing, and there will always be rich and poor.” (Ch 30) Yes, he’s an archetypal member of the patriarchy, a hypocrite who sees no connection between himself making Jacky his mistress (excusable, “I am a man, and have lived a man’s past”; Ch 26) and Helen becoming pregnant (inexcusable). Nevertheless he marries and therefore connects with on some level the stewards of Howards End, first Ruth and then Margaret, and therefore he has some capacity to understand and appreciate the spiritual side of life. At Ruth’s funeral his thoughts show that he can at least glimpse Ruth in her Mother Nature role: “Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the gift of God. Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field.” (Ch 11)

But on the whole Henry deals with life by chopping it up into sections small enough for him to deal with, the way we eat a jacket potato. he compartmentalises things. He sees this as concentrating, as focussing. He deals with things in bits and that way he can cope with them. His love for Margaret cannot be allowed to interfere with his business interests.

He is a man of strong opinions who finds it difficult to admit that he is, or has done, wrong. He tells Helen that the firm Leonard works for is about to fail and disclaims responsibility after she persuades Leonard to change job, for a smaller wage, and his first firm stays solvent. Henry denies that the wych-elm has pig’s teeth embedded in it. And when he is exposed as a man who has had a mistress he very quickly gets on his high horse, accusing Margaret of arranging his exposure and refusing to give Leonard a job because he never responds to what he characterises as blackmail.

Leonard Bast is the sacrificial victim. He is a poor man, both in terms of money and cultural education. In another example of a disconnect causing unhappiness, he is ashamed of his roots (his family were agricultural labourers in Lincolnshire) and seeks to better himself by going to classical concerts, reading ‘improving’ books such as Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and decorating his basement flat with “one of the masterpieces of Maude Goodman” (Ch 6). The Schlegels half-heartedly try to befriend him although “he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.” Maude Goodman’s paintings are overly sentimental. Forster is snobbishly but sympathetically showing that Bast is culturally inadequate. Fundamentally Leonard has no agency and yet he is crucial to the resolution of the plot.

Helen Schlegel, Margaret’s younger sister, represents feeling uncontrolled by reason. She is impulsive and spontaneous. At the start of the book she has a one-night-engagement; near the end she has a one-night-stand. Her heart is always in the right place but she leaps before she looks and the consequences of her actions are rarely what she has intended.

Ruth Wilcox is a nebulous and mystic figure. Somehow she always knows what is going on but she finds practicalities such as buying Christmas presents difficult.

Tibby Schlegel: The personification of culture and intellectualism taken to the extreme, Tibby, the younger brother of Margaret and Helen, is effete and etiolated, frail and given to laziness. At the concert, he sits with the score on his knee. He lives entirely in the context of towns (London and Oxford) and even there suffers from hay-fever. Is he a self-portrait of the author?

Charles Wilcox: The Wilcox equivalent of Tibby: commerce at its worst. We first see him as entitled, privileged bully; almost his first statement is: “This station’s abominably organized; if I had my way, the whole lot of ‘em should get the sack.” (Ch 3) One of his trophies is a Dutch Bible which he presumably looted during the Boer War (Ch 18)

Jacky Bast: “It is simplest to say that she was not respectable.” (Ch 6) When she had lived in Cyprus she had been Henry’s mistress. At the start of the story she is living in sin with Leonard; later they marry.

Miss Avery: the crazy old caretaker of Howards End whose function is to ensure that it passes from Ruth Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel, despite having had a marriage proposal from Ruth’s brother.

The theme:
So what is the theme of this novel to which these characters dance? One needs to look no further than the epigraph: “Only connect”. But that is a little gnomic, to say the least. What does it mean? Forster explains it at two key moments. The first is just after the 50% mark when Margaret is trying to rationalise her decision to marry Henry (and this unlikely wedding is itself a symbol of the need to join the world of culture represented by the Schlegels with that of commerce represented by the Wilcoxes except for Ruth). Margaret thinks: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. ... Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” (Ch 22) The second, near the end, is more explicit. She is berating Henry for his hypocrisy: “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress - I forgave you. My sister has a lover - you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel - oh, contemptible! - a man who insults his wife when she is alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins other women for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he’s not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognize them, because you cannot connect.” (Ch 38)

Connections are key, the most obvious one being that between Margaret and Henry which is between what Margaret calls “personal relations” and the “outer” life, which “seems the real one - there’s grit in it” (Ch 4). But there are multiple other connections and disconnections:

• When Leonard first meets the Wilcoxes in the person of Evie and Mr W, she laughs at him as Margaret tells him “You tried to get away from the folks that are stifling us all - away past books and houses to the truth. You were looking for a real home” (a significant portion of this novel is about the search for a home; the Schlegels have lived in a house in London all there lives but the lease expires during the novel and they have to move out of it) nand he responds, angrily “I fail to see the connection.” (Ch 16) Leonard is desperately trying to connect with the world of high culture.
• The Schlegel’s are half-German. Their father was a German who even fought in the Bismarckian wars (“against Denmark, Austria, France”) that turned Germany from a hodge-podge of tiny principalities into a unified nation; he then became disillusioned with the fruits of victory epitomised by “the smashed windows of the Tuileries” and “Pan-Germanism” which seems to be the English “Imperialism” in another flavour (Ch 4). The Schlegels therefore connect England with Europe in their very genes ; Margaret sees this as a connection between emotion and reason: “The Continent, for good or for evil, is interested in ideas” (Ch 9). The concert they and their German relatives attend in chapter 5 has both German and English music: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance.
• A key theme is the idea that the world is endangered by this disconnect between modernity and nature. Creeping urbanisation even threatens Howards End: on the horizon there is a rust-red belt of housing which threatens to come ever closer. Charles is driving a motorcar when we first encounter him; when it makes a dust cloud which makes the villagers cough he muses: “I wonder when they'll learn wisdom and tar the roads.” (Ch 3) Forster seemed prescient about cars: “Month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through the dirt with an admired obscurity.” (Ch 13)
• From the start of the book there is a disconnect between the Wilcoxes and nature, symbolised by the fact that Henry and Charles and Evie all have hayfever (as does Tibby, the younger brother of the Schlegel sisters, who is so disconnected from the natural world that he gets hayfever in London).
• There is a disconnect between rich and poor. This is personified by the gulf in understanding between the Wilcox/Schlegels and the Basts, prefigured when Leonard is reading Ruskin and admiring his prose even when he is subconsciously aware that it doesn’t quite work. “The voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.” (Ch 6) This disconnect (and Forster admits that “We are not concerned with the very poor. ... this story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.”; Ch 6) comes to the fore when Henry Wilcox repeatedly offers the human nature argument: “If wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there will be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working men would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.” (Ch 17) and again: “There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal ... when desire for equality has made them happier. ... Our civilization is moulded by great impersonal forces (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the personal) ... You grab the dollars. God does the rest.” (Ch 22) Even Leonard accepts this, telling Margaret “There will always be rich and poor” (Ch 26). This insistence (the phrase “rich and poor” occurs nine times in the book) seems to be Forster’s response to what Jesus says in Matthew 26:11: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”?

The Understory

From this comes the understory. Howards End represents rural England as perceived through the lens of nostalgia. This is not a world of toiling and illiterate peasants, periodically culled by famine and pestilence, whose lives are 'nasty, brutish and short'. This is Merrie England where squires are squires and villagers touch their forelocks to the gentry. But for Forster, this is a world of certainties, of traditions and timelessness and stability.

Ruth, the first Mrs Wilcox, is a sort of Mother Nature or Earth Goddess, a mystical figure. As Margaret tells Helen late in the book: “I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. ... She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room.” (Ch 40)

Her improbable marriage to Henry Wilcox is necessary because her world, the world of Howards End of which she is owner, must be connected to the commercial world. Her death, early in the story, disrupts this union. Her solution is to bequeath Howards End to Margaret Schlegel as her “spiritual heir.” (Ch 11).

This informal legacy is set aside by the Wilcoxes, a decision which they justify by arguing that Ruth herself believed in ancestry and her apparently perverse bequest means she has been “treacherous to the family, to the laws of property, to her own written word.” (Ch 11). This action creates the rift which drives the rest of the plot.

It is achieved by fragmenting the issue so as to strip the emotion from it: “The two men ... did not make the mistake of handling human affairs in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply. ... Considered item by item, the emotional content was minimised, and all went forward smoothly.” (Ch 11) And the effect is to divorce the people inside the house from the world outside: "The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning. Evie’s fox terrier, who had passed for white, was only a dirty grey dog now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited, but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness, for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside, the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note. Other clocks confirmed it, and the discussion moved towards its close.” (Ch 11)

It reminded me of the legend of the fisher-king, in Arthurian grail-guest legend, whose realm became a desolate landscape after he had committed some grievous sin. Margaret, legally, has been separated from Howards End and the purpose of the test of the novel is to reconnect the two of them; until that happens the world will be wrong. This happens, like all good inciting incidents, just after the 25% mark. The next major turning-point, Henry’s proposal to Margaret, is at 50%. The 75% mark is when we discover Henry’s seedy past.

This reconnection of Margaret with Howards End begins when Henry proposes to her and she becomes, despite obstacles, the second Mrs Wilcox. But she is still not in possession of the house until, in a very ‘Hero’s Journey’ moment, she encounters spooky old Miss Avery, the strange housekeeper who, in echoes of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, might herself have been the proprietor of Howards End if she had agreed to marry Ruth’s brother. Miss Avery is a wyrd sister, one of the fates, given to prophecy, who mistakes Margaret for Ruth, anointing Margaret as the sanctified successor to Ruth, and says: “I take it you were intended to get Wilcox anyway, whether she got him first or no.” (Ch 33).

The antagonists are the Wilcoxes, especially Henry and Charles. They represent the world of commerce, in particular an imperialist and commercial commerce, specialising in Africa which, as shown on a map in their offices, resembles a whale from which chunks are being hewed (Forster’s nod to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published eleven years earlier, perhaps). The Wilcoxes have gone so far as to build a garage for their cars “all among the wych-elm roots.” (Ch 15) although Henry - the Wilcox who comes closest to connecting with nature, marrying both Ruth and Margaret - does at least say “I shouldn’t want that fine wych-elm spoilt.” (Ch 22)

The wych-elm is a key motif symbolising nature. It appears at the start of the book and the end and fourteen times in between. The ‘wych’ part of the name is obviously symbolic, even though it doesn’t mean ‘witch’ (it derives from the Old English ‘wice’ meaning bendable as in ‘weak’ and ‘wicker’). This wych-elm, based on a real tree at Rookswood, Forster’s childhood home, has in days of yore had pig’s teeth driven into its bark; the local villagers believe it will cure the toothache. It is “under the column of the vast wych-elm” that Paul woos Helen in chapter 4. In chapter 40, Margaret and Helen resolve their differences and reconnect under the shadow of the wych-elm. During this discussion, Margaret is distracted as she thinks of the “teeth that had been thrust into the tree’s bark to medicate it” and Helen actually lays her face against the tree as if the tree will cure a dis-ease worse than toothache.

The ending
The ending is a bit contrived, almost absurdly so. In the very nearly final scene, Margaret and pregnant Helen are hiding out in Howards End; drawn there also, just at the right moment, are guilt-ridden Leonard and avenging angel Charles. Charles, acting as the outraged male and carrying out Henry’s wishes that the bounder who deflowered a female member of his wife’s family should be “thrashed within an inch of his life” (Ch 38); he uses the Schlegel’s father’s sword for this. In a blatantly symbolic act, bibliophile Leonard pulls down a bookcase on top of himself and dies (of a heart attack). Margaret tells Henry she is leaving him but Henry has other worries: he realises that Charles will be convicted of manslaughter. The shame of this cripples Henry; he says: "I’m broken—I’m ended.” (Ch 42). This causes Margaret to change her mind. It reminded me of the end of Jane Eyre in which the feisty heroine can only be reconciled with the wannabe bigamist Rochester after he has been crippled and blinded. The message seems to be that dominant women can only marry alpha males after they have been brought down.

There is an epilogue-like ending set fourteen months on. Connection having been achieved. Margaret, Helen and Henry are living a rural idyll at Howards End with the little son of Leonard and Helen. The hay harvest if splendid. Providing that the westerly gales don’t topple the wych-elm, which would “bring the end of all things” (Ch 44), and now that Henry has been humbled, domesticated and tamed, everyone - except for dead Leonard, imprisoned Charles, and unmentioned Jacky, can live happily ever after.

So it an interesting novel of ideas with multiple themes and several layers but for me the talent of the author shows in the way that he can take such a schematic story and such archetypal characters and disguise it so well with a page-turning plot peopled with characters in whom you can believe.

Cultural references:
Sense and Sensibility
It is said that Jane Austen was EMF’s favourite author. Are Margaret and Helen based on Elinor and Marianne, the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility? The names are resonant: Margaret and Marianne start with the same three letters and Elinor and Helen are fundamentally the same name. But the characters are transposed: Elinor is the prudent one in S&S, Margaret’s equivalent, while Marianne is the more emotional one (Helen). The equivalence is rather marred by the fact that there is a third sister in S&S, called Margaret, who plays almost no part in the story. (Memo to self: must reread Jane Austen’s oeuvre, especially given that this year (2025) is the bicentennial of her death in Winchester.)

A Room With a View
In chapter 13, Margaret is asking Tibby about his intentions for the future. She mentions Mr Vyse who “never strikes me as particularly happy.” Is he the same Mr Vyse as appears in A Room With a View, in which he is a rejected suitor?

L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun
At the classical music concert in chapter 5, Mrs Munt (Aunt Juley) gives, as an example of music she doesn’t like, “something about a faun in French”. This is presumably Debussy’s Prelude L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun which was first performed in December 1894. Since Howards End was published in 1910, EMF would not have known of the ballet to this music which was choreographed by Nijinsky and performed by himself with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, whose May 1912 premiere in Paris is sometimes regarded as the birth of modern ballet.

Tom Jones
When Mr Wilcox takes Margaret for a meal at Simpsons-on-the-Strand, she observes that “the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones.” (Ch 17)

Richard II by Shakespeare
Margaret wonders about England: “Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have 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?” (Ch 19) In John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II, England is compared to a “precious stone set in a silver sea.”

Selected quotes:

• “It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious ... the confidence trick is the work of a man but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.” (Ch 5)
• “To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge.” (Ch 5)
• “I do not go in for being musical ... I only care for music - a very different thing. but still I will say this for myself - I do know when I like a thing and when I don't.” (Ch 5)
• “It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality - bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil.” (Ch 6)
• “She felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of Life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.” (Ch 7)
• “Money pads the edges of things ... God help those who have none.” (Ch 7)
• “To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory.” (Ch 8)
• “She mistrusted the periods of quiet that are essential to true growth.” (Ch 10)
• “So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another's ears with wool.” (Ch 11)
• “Oxford is - Oxford; not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge.” (Ch 12) Forster had a life-long association with King's College Cambridge
• “She knew this type very well - the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books.” (Ch 14)
• “Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had Mr Bast to profit?” (Ch 15)
• “Independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.” (Ch 15)
• “Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.” (Ch 20) Because everything is connected.
• “No Wilcox could live near, or near the possessions of, any other Wilcox. They had the colonial spirit, and were always making for some spot where the white man might carry his burden unobserved.” (Ch 24) The Wilcoxes can't even connect with one another.
• “Margaret ... never forgot anyone for whom she had once cared; she connected, though the connection might be bitter, and she hoped that some day Henry would do the same.” (Ch 25)
• “Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature’s to keep things going?” (Ch 28) There's a disconnect!
• “Were all Helen’s actions to be governed by a tiny mishap, such as may happen to any young man or woman?” (Ch 34) Delicious misdirection! Margaret is thinking that Helen has been driven mad by regret over her one-night engagement to Paul Wilcox. In fact, Helen’s odd behaviour is later to be exp[lained by the fact that she is pregnant following a one-night-stand with Leonard Bast.
• “Of all the means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.” (Ch 41)

September 2014; 316 pages

First published in 1910 by Edward Arnold

My Penguins Classic edition was issued in 1981

Forster also wrote:

• The Longest Journey
• Where Angels Fear to Tread 
• A Room With a View 
• Maurice
• A Passage to India

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God