E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread is a strange and perfect novel, with a simple plot that evolves through unexpected transitions into a complex exploration of passion; and with characters that are at first glance archetypes of cold, reserved England and hot, passionate Italy, but whose depths become more and more nuanced, mysterious, and surprising as they are revealed. There is tragedy in the novel, told without fanfare, and there is high and low emotion (quite out of alignment with high and low church), and having more to do with art, music, stars, and Etruscan profiles than with true English values of effacement, common sense, and duty.
A silly English widow is packed off to Italy by her disgruntled well-bred in-laws. She falls immediately in love with the vision of a young man sitting astride an old wall, and wants both for herself, man and wall. Because she has money and blonde hair, she gets the man (and wall) but when her in-laws hear of it back in respectable England, all hell breaks loose. A younger son of the deceased husband is sent to set things straight: “‘I will do all I can,’ said Philip in a low voice. It was the first time he had anything to do.” And from there the plot progresses with expected stops and runs of intervention, ignoring (and ignorance), and resignation, and with surprising turns of heroic and non-heroic action and more than a bit of love, passion, and enchantment. With plenty of time spent both in England and in Italy, Forster uses his story of love, procreation, death, and duty to expound on a favorite theme, civilized repression versus savage passion: “Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no one loves him, but where he will be brought up well?”
There are similarities in plot to A Room With A View, and also to A Passage to India, where ordered, manacled English types are subjected to foreign and unbridled passions. Forster lets us know which of his characters we are to consider worthy by the telltale sign of the stirring of romance within their soul. Unstirred souls are to be sent packing back to Sawston or Tunbridge Wells, where they can continue with their “[p]etty unselfishness….everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn’t care for, to please people they didn’t love…they never learnt to be sincere — and, what’s as bad, never learnt to enjoy themselves.“ However, those seekers of beauty in act, thought, and feeling are honored in Forster’s universe as true angels daring to tread without fear in their search for heaven: “Had she ever been so happy before? Yes, once before, and here“: in Italy, under a “really purple sky and really silver stars“.
I love Forster and this book was a delight, with his very funny asides and dry observations, his unabashed rooting for romance to win out over common sense, for honesty to vanquish facade, and for feeling to overcome rules, and his thoroughly provoking — in all the right ways — characters of angels and Englishmen.
