Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster ~ 1905. This edition: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1995. Hardcover. ISBN: not found. 208 pages.
My rating: 6/10
My relatively high rating of 6 is mainly for the quality of some of the writing. If judged by the appeal of plot and characters alone, this would get about a 4 or so.
I felt that the author lost his way towards the end, and I couldn’t abide any of the characters by the final chapter, least of all the main male protagonist, young Italiophile Philip.
So, has anyone else read this first novel by E.M. Forster? And if so, what did you think?
I found it rather uneven, with moments of sheer brilliance interspersed with numerous rather shaky bits. And the ending was not what I’d expected. I think that is possibly a good thing in a literary sense, in that I was shocked out of my readerly complacency – I thought I was reading merely a satirically humorous tale for the longest time – but I felt it (the final tragic occurrence and its aftermath) ultimately rather artistically troubling, as none of the responses of the characters to the contrived situation felt genuinely satisfactory. (Sorry to be all mysterious as to the nature of the tragedy – I don’t want to spoil the ending, in case someone is half way through and wondering where it’s all going.)
This is a very slender novel, really more of a novella in its limited scope, and not up to the standard of Forster’s later, longer, more complex and much better-known works such as A Room with a View, Howard’s End, and A Passage to India. But as I’ve already mentioned, there are passages of wonderful writing in Where Angels Fear to Tread, which show what Forster was capable of at his best.
A widowed Englishwoman, very much under the thumb of her in-laws, departs for a year in Italy in the company of a much younger woman, whom she is to chaperone. It is hoped by the in-laws that the beauties of Italian art, architecture and culture will have a refining effect on the rather common nature of slightly foolish, slightly crass Lilia Herriton, and everyone concerned draws a sigh of relief when the train bears her away. Even her young daughter is content to see her go, and her mother-in-law is positively gleeful to have a free hand with bringing up her deceased son’s only child.
At first all is well, and Lilia writes gushing epistles home full of wonder at the beauties of Italy, leading her in-laws to hope that she will return a changed-for-the-better woman. But then a further letter comes, announcing Lilia’s engagement to an Italian “met in a hotel”. Shocked inquiries by telegram bring in return a brief explanation from Lilia’s companion, that the fiancé is “of the Italian nobility”. Something doesn’t seem quite right, and an immediate intervention is put into action, with the dispatch of Lilia’s young brother-in-law, Philip, with orders to set things straight and bring Lilia back home unencumbered with an Italian second husband, “nobility” or not.
Philip finds himself arriving too late to prevent the worst, for Lilia has actually married her Italian swain. Far from being a member of the nobility, he turns out to be the impoverished son of the local dentist, and Philip finds Lilia defensive and unrepentant and her young travelling companion in the throes of guilty despair, for she has encouraged the unlikely lovers in their wedding plans, and has now, with the arrival of the appalled Philip, realized the extreme unsuitability of the liaison and her own role in it.
Lilia is cast off by her exceedingly genteel in-laws back in England, and left alone to make do the best she can in her new life. Needless to say things are not quite as rosy as she has expected, and even the fact that she is comparatively wealthy and can afford a high standard of living for herself and her husband in the small Italian town where they establish their nuptial home does not compensate Lilia for her subsequent bitter loneliness and boredom as she finds herself isolated by nationality, language, and personality from everyone around her.
Lilia is not left to linger long, as she exits the Italian scene as impetuously as she entered it, triggering new complications which again cause the family of her first husband much hand-wringing and heart-burning. Philip finds himself despatched once more to attempt a resolution to an exceedingly awkward state of affairs, this time accompanied by his impetuous and outspoken sister Harriet. They are hot on the heels of Lilia’s one-time lady-companion, who, still wracked with guilt over the original scenario, has also departed post-haste to Italy in order to effect her own attempted rescue mission of the only true innocent in the increasingly sordid tale.
There is plenty of room for farce in all of these goings on, and Forster plays his characters for comedic effect well, but the story turns relentlessly from comedy to tragedy, and all of Philip’s (and the young author’s?) anguished philosophizing cannot turn back the course of events.
A tacked-on sort of romantic coda at the very end felt to me out of place. I’m not quite sure what I would have had the author do in its stead. Perhaps stop sooner and leave us to use our imaginations at the point of the tragedy? As it was, to my mind the story lost much of its poignancy because of what came after.
I doubt I’ll be reading this book again, though it has reminded me how good Forster can be, if in a slightly patchwork fashion. I may be looking at him again in the new year, and reading some of his later works once the Century project is all tidied up.
Where Angels Fear to Tread is an excellent title, even to its gentle warning to the reader not to expect a completely satisfactory tale.
My final verdict: I felt this was an “interesting” book, rather than a particularly “good” one.
Leaves & Pages 
I did read this one, probably about 25 years ago so I can’t remember my thoughts on it, I wish I had taken notes back then. I still have the book but don’t know if I should go for a re-read now.
It almost felt like a waste-of-precious-reading-time book. When I later read the back fly leaf and found it was Forster’s first published work my first thought was “Aha! That explains its occasional awkwardness.” It felt like the author had a lot to say beyond the bounds of the actual story – he goes on and on and on about the emotional responses engendered in his English main character Philip by Italy – Philip loves Italy and Italians in general until faced up with the marriage of his sister-in-law to an actual inhabitant of the country, and a very lower class one at that. The rose-coloured glasses are shattered, as it were. Philip scrambles to regain his composure and reassess his thoughts and it gets very angsty. I rather wondered what connection Forster had with Italy…But some of the vignettes are marvelous – well worth reading for the images they present. Luckily the book is short and one can justify the time spent by those few gems of descriptive prose. 🙂
I love EM Forster, but as you say this is an early one and certainly not his best. There’s a film that I remember seeing, or maybe it was a TV version? You’ve made me long to revisit him, and look forward to your comments when you have.
I recently read “Where Angels Fear To Tread” for the first time and completely share your feeling that it’s a difficult book to love even if the quality of the writing itself is, for the most part, excellent. Forster perhaps felt the same. In a letter to fellow author RC Trevelyan, written soon after it was published, he wrote: “The object of the book is the improvement of Philip, and I did really want the improvement to be a surprise…But I do begin to think that this ‘surprise’ method is artistically wrong, and that from the first one must suggest the possibility, not merely the non-impossibility, of improvement. I disliked and do dislike finger posts, and couldn’t bear in the earlier scenes the thought of inserting ‘Philip has other things in him besides these: watch him,’ however well the insertion had been made…I pushed this dislike to an extreme and should have felt the suggestion that a book must have one atmosphere to be pedantic. Life hasn’t any, and the hot and the cold of its changes are fascinating to me. I determined to imitate in this and let the result be artistic if it liked. Naturally it did not like.”
While the book has its flaws, I think it’s vital to remember that “Where Angels Fear To Tread” was Forster’s debut novel and his first attempt to address the problem of “connection” – between countries, between cultures and, most importantly, between socially divided, emotionally repressed human beings. In every novel he published, he endeavoured to show how alike people are once their so-called “differences” – social, emotional, financial, even sexual – have been willingly discarded or otherwise stripped away, obliging them to relate to each other as individuals rather than as members of a specific class or culture. This is why the phrase “Only connect!” – appearing like a rallying cry in his fourth novel “Howards End” (1910) – crops up time and time again in discussions of his work. Connection is acceptance and acceptance equals life; disconnection leads only to confusion, misrepresentation and, sometimes, to disaster. In this earlier work he’s launching his first attack, via the unlikeable but realistically drawn character of Philip Herriton, on that stuffy, peculiarly English reserve so prevalent throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras when widows like Lilia – along with their children, their servants and anybody else who wasn’t a white middle-class British male – were expected to be seen and not heard, let alone allowed to determine the course of their own lives. As the material quoted above hopefully confirms, the juxtaposition of farce and tragedy in the book was a deliberately chosen literary device, designed to reflect the realities of life for people of the English middle-class class prior to the illusion-shattering experience that was the outbreak of World War One. Life is tragic sometimes, Forster wants to remind us, but it’s also funny, sentimental, unexpected and often plain bewildering in equal measure too.
This is the problem, I find, with reading the early work of those whom time and reputation have now combined to anoint as “literary geniuses.” We tend to judge everything, especially an author’s apprentice work, in comparison with their later masterpieces, forgetting that these are nearly always the result of their earlier, not always satisfying experiments. Forster certainly “got things right” in his later novels, but “Where Angels Fear To Tread” is where the process of him doing this began. For me it remains a book worth reading (and re-reading) for that reason alone.
As always, your review raises some very interesting questions, L&P. Thanks for posting it and for inviting your readers to share their thoughts about this fascinating if occasionally puzzling work of literature with you (however long-winded &/or unwelcome though these thoughts may be!).
BR – I’m going to incorporate your comment into the original post. Thank you for the background info – it sheds an illuminating light on the novel. You have a much more thoughtful approach to this one – I must confess I merely read it “as a novel” without any consideration of the author’s intentions. I do think he succeeded in portraying the development of Philip, and it was very obvious right from the get-go that Philip was the person whom we were supposed to be most interested in, and it didn’t feel terribly contrived – Forster didn’t come right out and say “Watch him!” – but I did. So that bit worked. I felt that the female characters were in general extremely hard to really come to grips with, though I think Forster did try to get inside their heads. With a few exceptions – the garden scene (planting peas) at the beginning was marvelous, for example – I didn’t feel that this came off so well. And the Italians – for all of Forster/Philip’s obvious admiration of the concept of Italy and Italians, the people were carictures, despite some touching moments – I’m thinking here of the bath scene which comes immediately before the tragedy. The connection between everyone in the room comes through brilliantly – a typical Forster moment, indeed. But I still think the novel could have ended sooner, and been stronger. I felt that the attempt at resolution and the “romantic” conclusion were awkward and just a bit “too much” – it would (paradoxically) have been a cleaner sort of story if we had been left to use our imaginations. Perhaps? See now, I said I wasn’t likely to re-read this one and now I most likely will! 😉
I agree with every point you raise, L&P, particularly in regard to the novel running on too long. The “romantic conclusion” was, as you know, very much the done thing in Edwardian times, so perhaps it was a case of Forster trying to meet his publisher’s commercial expectations. The ending as it stands certainly has the whiff of that to me.
It’s interesting what you say re: his treatment of the Italians, which to my mind is not dissimilar to how he depicts them in “Room With A View.” I’ve always thought this “caricature” approach to be a conscious and deliberate one, employed to show the fundamental differences between the British and the Italians that a twit like Philip believes he “understands” and has even “openly embraced” when, as events soon prove, he’s a million miles away from doing any such thing. Being fond of Italian landscapes and wittering on about the glories of Italian art aren’t the same things as loving (or even beginning to understand or genuinely appreciate) the Italian people themselves. The attitude of Forster’s English characters towards his Italian characters is usually always patronizing and, in that sense, an accurate reflection of the era in which his early novels were written and are set. Insisting that you “admired” the Italians and other “primitives” for their “high spirits” and “simplicity” was a fashionable social stance to take in Edwardian times, a kind of reverse snobbery that has yet to completely disappear among the English aristocracy. Choosing to view people who are different to you – and whose lifestyles may threaten your values or even inspire a certain jealousy in terms of what they can and can’t get away with – as “childlike” and “simple” is also a handy way to dismiss and ignore them. That directly challenges Forster’s idea of “connection” and the importance he placed on it as both a man and as a writer.
I see absolutely no need for you to rewrite or otherwise amend your original post (unless you actually want to, then of course you should). It’s well written, concise and reads just fine as it is. Thanks again for opening this one up to discussion. I love Forster and take comfort from the fact that intelligent people like yourself still read him and make the effort to blog about him.