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A review by jesshindes
Howards End by E.M. Forster
dark
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
A very funny aspect to reading more classic novels this year is that probably nobody needs me to be like, 'Howards End is good actually'. Wouldn't you know it, Howards End is good. I read this to go with the Brandon Taylor I already blogged about - now working on the essay or whatever it will be - but yes, it's great obviously. I liked it a lot for its vision of pre-first-world-war London (who knew there was like a vegetarian health food restaurant popular at the period) but mostly for the narrative voice, which is confident and opinionated in a way that is so so rare in novels nowadays (is anybody doing that prominent third-person omniscient narrator thing?? who?).
The book is about class, and also about art and money (which is what made me think it would sit well with The Late Americans). It offers more or less three models for approaching the world: the Schlegels, Margaret and Helen, are our main characters, are half-German, love to be intellectual and go to concerts and read poetry and think about the more intangible things in life; care a lot about 'human relations'. The Wilcoxes are acquaintances met on holiday who become a much larger part of their lives; they have a much more prosaic (more English?) set of priorities: sports, and money, and respectability. And then there is Leonard Bast, who has no money and aspires, desperately, to culture: he meets the Schlegels at a concert where Helen walks off with his umbrella and then he can't enjoy the concert anymore because he's so worried about the (very battered and crap) umbrella and the prospect of having to replace it. And then all three of these different moving planets pull into each others' orbits and things start to get a bit dangerous.
I had read this before, I think when I was in third year undergrad so probably about 15 years ago, and one of the things I'd forgotten but liked this time around was the book's explicit discussion of privilege. Margaret has a little speech where she points out that the six-hundred-a-year income of which both she and Helen are in possession means that they have the luxury of a kind of mental space that is not afforded to the very poor: "all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches." There's a scene where Helen and Margaret go to a kind of debate club and talk about How To Help the Poor and everybody wants to do all these schemes but Margaret is like, should we not just give them a lot of money? And of course that goes down very badly. But Forster is more subtle or the book more complex than all of this, and Margaret's good ideas become complicated by her 'personal relations' with the Wilcox family, who I really struggled to have any time for at all (Margaret admires them as a kind of 'spirit of the Empire' which might explain some things tbh) and everything ends up badly for, well, the obvious and inevitable people.
I had forgotten how funny this book was, and I do think there are layers of satire happening here: obvious mockery of the Wilcoxes but then something fairly (faintly?) damning about the Schlegels, too. I found the ending (which I won't spoil here) really shocking, maybe even more shocking, this time around; not just the Big Thing that happens but what comes afterwards, the way that that six hundred pounds reasserts its presence. I don't think the novel necessarily answers the questions it raises but it does manage to say a lot of funny and accurate and pointed things about society, including a whole ton of things about gender relations that I haven't even started to get into here. But yeah. I want to say something clever here about intersectionality and the novel's mantra, 'only connect'. Still thinking about it. Watch this space, haha
The book is about class, and also about art and money (which is what made me think it would sit well with The Late Americans). It offers more or less three models for approaching the world: the Schlegels, Margaret and Helen, are our main characters, are half-German, love to be intellectual and go to concerts and read poetry and think about the more intangible things in life; care a lot about 'human relations'. The Wilcoxes are acquaintances met on holiday who become a much larger part of their lives; they have a much more prosaic (more English?) set of priorities: sports, and money, and respectability. And then there is Leonard Bast, who has no money and aspires, desperately, to culture: he meets the Schlegels at a concert where Helen walks off with his umbrella and then he can't enjoy the concert anymore because he's so worried about the (very battered and crap) umbrella and the prospect of having to replace it. And then all three of these different moving planets pull into each others' orbits and things start to get a bit dangerous.
I had read this before, I think when I was in third year undergrad so probably about 15 years ago, and one of the things I'd forgotten but liked this time around was the book's explicit discussion of privilege. Margaret has a little speech where she points out that the six-hundred-a-year income of which both she and Helen are in possession means that they have the luxury of a kind of mental space that is not afforded to the very poor: "all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches." There's a scene where Helen and Margaret go to a kind of debate club and talk about How To Help the Poor and everybody wants to do all these schemes but Margaret is like, should we not just give them a lot of money? And of course that goes down very badly. But Forster is more subtle or the book more complex than all of this, and Margaret's good ideas become complicated by her 'personal relations' with the Wilcox family, who I really struggled to have any time for at all (Margaret admires them as a kind of 'spirit of the Empire' which might explain some things tbh) and everything ends up badly for, well, the obvious and inevitable people.
I had forgotten how funny this book was, and I do think there are layers of satire happening here: obvious mockery of the Wilcoxes but then something fairly (faintly?) damning about the Schlegels, too. I found the ending (which I won't spoil here) really shocking, maybe even more shocking, this time around; not just the Big Thing that happens but what comes afterwards, the way that that six hundred pounds reasserts its presence. I don't think the novel necessarily answers the questions it raises but it does manage to say a lot of funny and accurate and pointed things about society, including a whole ton of things about gender relations that I haven't even started to get into here. But yeah. I want to say something clever here about intersectionality and the novel's mantra, 'only connect'. Still thinking about it. Watch this space, haha
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death
Someone dies of heart failure