Howard's End by E.M.Forster

This book was a trial to me from beginning to end.  I started it eagerly enough - even though it wasn't really on my 'list' of books I've always wanted to read, it's a classic (or at least I think it is) and what's more it was a short paperback.

By the time I was two-thirds through it, I was reading it the way Tom Hanks 'reads' Pride and Prejudice in the film You've Got Mail.  I literally would fling the book away, promising myself that I was done for good, I wasn't even going to finish it.  Then I would roll my eyes and pick it up again - mostly because I'm stubborn as a rock when it comes to reading books, and also because unless a book is actually sordid or perverted, I will finish it so that I know what it's like from beginning to end.

Well, I know now, and let me tell you: I cannot think of a single good reason to recommend it.  The story wanders along so aimlessly, as though the book itself is disinterested in its own plot.  There are two sisters who are admirable in their love for each other, and a lovely house that you anticipate they will one day live in, but the struggle to keep the sisters in a good relationship with each other, and to get to the house in the end, is not in the least worth all the bother of finding out how they get there. 

I think part of my frustration with it was that there is so much reality - so much of what real life dishes out that we don't like, and struggle through, and weep over, and hurt from - and no redemption.  The first scene that really caused me to scowl and fling the book away was Margaret (one of the sisters) writing a note to a neighbour to explain why she felt they shouldn't spend any time together. The note was written in haste, and even its content admitted that she was probably going to regret its writing, but it was written and sent, and later on Margaret goes with abject apologies to the neighbour and has to struggle through an awkward friendship that never quite gets on the right footing again.  I've done things like this - sent a text, or an email, or said something, and later regretted it and apologised, and had to manage through difficult relations as a result.  It's not pleasant, and I don't like to think on it further, and even less do I like imagining someone else doing it, especially when the result is a tepid understanding, and things are worse off than at the beginning.

Everything in the book seemed so wan, so uncaring.  I thought I liked Helen (the other sister) at first, and then she seemed flighty and irresponsible and foolish.  Then I thought I liked Margaret, but she was stiff and hard and illogical.  Margaret falls in love, but with a man who is not worthy of her (or anyone), and I can never admire her or her husband, and the book resignedly agrees with me in the end.  No one is admirable, no one joyful.  England is proclaimed as the greatest of all countries (perhaps this is one of the aspects I hold against it, as one loyal to Scotland), but there is nothing to support its claims.  Even the house itself, Howard's End, struggles to stand as something worth loving, when it is filled with such fools as these.

And to add blankness to folly, no one has strong beliefs of any kind - about anything, or anyone.  Pale, washed-out statements about there perhaps being a God, but perhaps not; or heaven being a vague and uninteresting place, and hell about the same; no point to life and no eternity to hope for.  "Life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything..." - these kind of vague statements are peppered throughout, and make you feel a little as though the book was simply the result of Forster's dream, or babbled words on a psychologist's couch.

No, I didn't like it.  I'd be happy if I never finished it, but finish it I did, and although it was nice to get some kind of conclusion at the end, I felt a little as though there were several endings to it that were considered in succession and this one was simply chosen haphazardly from a scrap-bag.

I thought at first it was simply jet lag, or weariness, or just being tired of reading; but no, my point from Midnight in Austenland stands: a little too much reality is not what anyone wants - much less bland, washed-out reality with no clear trumpet call to glory, on this earth or beyond it.

At least Tom Hanks knows how I feel.