Ron Peters's Reviews > Howards End

Forster doesn’t do it for me. I already gave him a try with A Passage to India. The metaphysical spiritualism that infests that book and obfuscates the plot does not work for me, and Howards End is much the same that way. There are some things about his writing I like.

He’s a bit like Thomas Hardy in the good eye he has for landscapes, though these descriptions only make up small fragments of the book. He’s also good (and somewhat ahead of his time) in portraying the unbearable heaviness of Empire, class, and sexism – so, he’s a bit Dickensian that way. Is it this proto-PC quality that gives him his current cachet?

But the plotting of Howards End is inane at nearly all its important junctures. Even if it establishes something about Helen’s character, her jump in just a few paragraphs from unengaged to engaged to unengaged is goofy. Likewise, Henry and Margaret’s romance comes out of the blue. Henry and most of the Wilcoxes, are not characters they’re caricatures. Then, the denouement of Margaret and Henry welcoming Helen and her son to Howards End is jarring. Forster does a bad job of preparing the reader for these developments, both in terms of how he fails to develop his characters sufficiently and how the action fails to flow convincingly from preceding plot developments.

While he is not performing these important tasks of the novel, he is busy filling the book with non-nutritive filler – many chapters in my view simply fail to move the book along at all.