Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

I had read both Howards End and A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, but Where Angels Fear to Tread, perhaps a less famous novel, remained lingering unread in the same volume. It is a short book, which took me just a few long sittings to read, but I found it just as thought-provoking and darkly humorous as those other two novels. I was drawn in to the setting and the story so well as to nearly gasp aloud at its wicked twists.

The story begins with Lilia, the disappointing widow of the eldest son of the Herriton family, catching a train to begin a tour of Italy with Caroline Abbott, a friend of the family. A little later, when the family is informed that Lilia is engaged to be married in the town of Monteriano, Philip Herriton, a great lover of the charms and wonders of Italy, is sent to make things right. Unfortunately, as Phillip later reflects, “nothing ever did go right in Monteriano.”

So many aspects of Where Angels Fear to Tread lead me to believe that the story could just as easily be named Pride and Prejudice as the Jane Austen novel. The characters and the story are driven largely by those two concepts, but also by more juxtaposed concepts, such as convention and unconventionality, obedience and disobedience, vanity and vulgarity, virtue and violence.

As a result, the reader is often whipped back and forth between humor and heartbreak, and Forster was wonderfully skilled at invoking both. He pokes a great deal of wicked fun at English “society,” and the characters tramp in and out of the continent of Europe with an almost farcical incompetence, such as when Phillip is sent back to Monteriano yet again, along with his sister Harriet.

On the second day, the heat struck them, like a hand laid over the mouth, just as they were walking to see the tomb of Juliet. From that moment everything went wrong. They fled from Verona. Harriet’s sketchbook was stolen, and the bottle of ammonia in her trunk burst over her prayerbook, so that purple patches appeared on all her clothes. Then, as she was going through Mantua at four in the morning, Philip made her look out of the window because it was Virgil’s birthplace, and a smut flew in her eye, and Harriet with a smut in her eye was notorious.

Later, in Bologna, “The hotel smelled, two puppies were asleep on her bed, and her bedroom window looked into a belfry, which saluted her slumbering form every quarter of an hour.”

Of course, this story is not all laughing at unlucky travelers or the ironic silliness of English snobbery. There is also tragedy and sorrow, often coming as direct results of snobbery, but also of the desire to rebel against convention. There is death of the innocent and profound callousness of the guilty, really quite jarring heartbreak after all the jokes about convention and vulgarity.

The town of Monteriano is almost a character itself in this story. It not only sets a beautiful and enchanting backdrop for often very ugly events, but also affects the characters as much as they affect each other. In addition, Monteriano provides a contrast to Sawston, the English town where the Harringtons and Caroline Abbott live, a contrast that both drives the characters to act against convention and robs them of the convictions that drove them upon leaving Sawston. While most of the characters undergo great changes by the end of the novel, Monteriano will always stay the same. Even if “nothing ever did go right in Monteriano” for the Herritons and Miss Abbott, Monteriano will go right on without them, and may be better off for their continued absence.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now