Community Reviews
The first two sections are great. Not fully classic Forster - he spends a lot more time on plot and doesn't philosophize as much, but you still get adequate doses of his wit and moral sense. The themes are definitely classic Forster - friendship, truth and kindness, Nature and mystical places, tolerance, decency.
For most of the novel I was thinking to myself - why do fans of Forster not think as highly of this book? Seems very good.
Then I got to the final section, which suffered from two major issues. First and most frustrating to me, personally, was that Chapter 29 in particular and a few others as well were actually really unclear in several spots about what was happening and who was speaking, down to just ambiguous pronouns, "he" when there are 3 men in the room and all of them have spoken, but the "he" doesn't correspond to the last name mentioned. When you combine this confusion in a climactic scene with broken dialogue from emotional confused characters, it just makes it difficult to follow. You can figure it out, but it really disrupts your investment in the scene. At another point, a character reacts very significantly to something someone said, as though we heard it, but it wasn't in the text at all despite the narration not leaving any space for something to be whispered. I thought I had skipped a page or something. Just weird and amateurish and bad editing, something I do not expect from Forster, who is one of my favorite authors of all time, or from Penguin classics. Just weird.
And then second, the final beats of Rickie's story were too abrupt. He makes a serious decision, or seems to, and it seemed super rushed, and just didn't get time to breathe. I am fairly certain it was done for symbolism, but that seriously underserved his character.
So I guess I can see why fans of Forster rank this one pretty low. I still enjoyed it, but unlike A Room with a View, Passage to India, and Howard's End, I can't see wanting to re-read it in its entirety.
For most of the novel I was thinking to myself - why do fans of Forster not think as highly of this book? Seems very good.
Then I got to the final section, which suffered from two major issues. First and most frustrating to me, personally, was that Chapter 29 in particular and a few others as well were actually really unclear in several spots about what was happening and who was speaking, down to just ambiguous pronouns, "he" when there are 3 men in the room and all of them have spoken, but the "he" doesn't correspond to the last name mentioned. When you combine this confusion in a climactic scene with broken dialogue from emotional confused characters, it just makes it difficult to follow. You can figure it out, but it really disrupts your investment in the scene. At another point, a character reacts very significantly to something someone said, as though we heard it, but it wasn't in the text at all despite the narration not leaving any space for something to be whispered. I thought I had skipped a page or something. Just weird and amateurish and bad editing, something I do not expect from Forster, who is one of my favorite authors of all time, or from Penguin classics. Just weird.
And then second, the final beats of Rickie's story were too abrupt. He makes a serious decision, or seems to, and it seemed super rushed, and just didn't get time to breathe. I am fairly certain it was done for symbolism, but that seriously underserved his character.
So I guess I can see why fans of Forster rank this one pretty low. I still enjoyed it, but unlike A Room with a View, Passage to India, and Howard's End, I can't see wanting to re-read it in its entirety.
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