Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by
Annette Ferran
A Room with a View
There is nothing like falling in love, although
when it goes smoothly it can be quite boring to outside observers. Luckily for fiction, it rarely goes
smoothly.
E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (#79) is the nicest romance on the Modern
Library’s list. Nevertheless, it
is a romance with issues and impediments, and in Forster’s masterful hands a
compelling tale that travels back and forth between sensuous Italy and farcical
Britain.
Lucy is a well-bred, obedient young
woman with something smoldering inside her. Through the coincidences of British upper-class travel she
twice crosses paths with a father and son who might be well-bred but are not
necessarily obedient, at least not to British propriety. The father, Mr. Emerson, is romantic
and philosophical. His voice is
the foil to the reliable expectations laid out before Lucy, which she had
readily bought into. It isn’t that
Lucy is not allowed to be herself; it’s just that even as herself she hadn’t
felt any inclination to rebel against her predictable, respectable future.
But Lucy has a passionate soul. We can
see it in her piano playing: she plays Beethoven with a particular, almost
unsettling degree of feeling. We even see it in her relationship with her
younger brother Freddy, who is at the age between boyhood and manhood and is
overflowing with impetuous life, tolerated and indulged by his mother and his
sister. Lucy has a certain
something, which is perceived by Mr. Emerson’s son, George, but not at all by
her chaste beau, soon fiancé, Cecil.
And therein manifests Lucy’s conflict.
The older people in this story are very
interesting, and an examination of their characters and their relationships
could fill pages. There is Mr.
Emerson, Lucy’s mother Mrs. Honeychurch, Lucy’s cousin and chaperone Charlotte,
a romance novelist named Miss Lavish, and the local vicar Mr. Beebe. They have created little families for themselves
among one another, but each is without a life partner. There is fun and sociability in their
lives, there is friendship and companionship, but there is no romance. If Lucy and Charlotte hadn’t encountered
the Emersons on their Italian sojourn in Florence, Lucy might have grown
predictably into the same enjoyable but non-romantic life, and she might have
been satisfied with it. But she
did meet the Emersons, and each of these older people, in his or her own way,
encourages the young ones toward love, which in this
novel is synonymous with life.
A motif is the celebration of the nude
male as the symbol of art, passion, and freedom. In Florence, this type of art surrounds the British visitors
and challenges their aesthetics and their morals (as does the sometimes violent
passion of the Italian people).
Back in England, it is echoed in a spontaneous, playful swimming outing
with Freddy, George, and Mr. Beebe (representing three ages of a man), which is
accidentally seen by Lucy, Cecil, and cousin Charlotte. They are scandalized, mostly on behalf
of the young, pure women, but maybe they are only very slightly
scandalized. Maybe at least two of
them are also awakened to the beauty that life contains.
The tone and the structure of this
novel are like a piece of Beethoven’s music – the “Moonlight” sonata comes to
mind. The novel is melodic, with a
somewhat brooding undercurrent punctuated by bright notes of joy and also with
discordant notes that sit a moment and then resolve themselves. This is what falling in love, real
love, is like as well: the uncertainties induce extreme unhappiness, even
sparks of irritation and anger.
But then the merest appearance of the object of one’s infatuation is
like shafts of sun, like a snatch of song in perfect harmony. The real love
between Lucy and George illuminates the inadequacies of the supposed love
arrangement between Lucy and Cecil.
Once that light is shined, it can’t be turned off again.
The message of this novel is an exuberant
one, celebrating happiness. Mr.
Emerson says it best: “Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off
the box when it happens to sit there?” he asks a conflicted Lucy. And: “By
the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like,
but a Yes.”
Annette
Ferran lives in Philadelphia where she works as an
editor for a medical publisher.
She is also the Associate Editor for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a Literary Writers Network
publication. She has a degree of dubious practical use, in German, and is a
lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists. She has had a few short
stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
