This is another novel I would never have struggled through if it were not on the list for the book club discussion. Set England in 1908-09, the 42 chapters trace the lives of various individuals and families who interact at Howard’s End, an estate in southern Hertfordshire. There are intriguing marital infidelities related in the delicate language of post-Victorian English prudishness.There are family secrets, conflicts, betrayals, and estrangements brought about by introspective, hypersensitive personalities and a willingness to take offence at any perceived slight. One character seems to experience what is known as synesthesia, a crossing of sensory input signals, as she hears music in the scenes of the Oder River, and sees elephants on listening to Beethoven, but this interesting phenomenon is never developed further.
There are probably many readers who have enjoyed the lyrical prose and the time-set efforts of the characters to bring meaning to their lives, but I am not one of them. To me the endless ethereal conversations with long asides to the reader conveying the author’s perspectives, become boring and confusing. A lot of sentences in quotation marks go on and on without letting the reader in on the secret of who is talking. Admittedly, there is some development of a consistent plot, almost totally absent for the first 200 pages, in the latter chapters.
This is no A Passage To India, Forster’s later most famous novel, which I really enjoyed. I await enlightenment from the book club members about what is so great about this one.
The Passionate Reader 