‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ - E.M. Forster

The first third of the book is almost a novel in itself. Widow Lilia is sent by her in-laws to Italy with a Miss Abbott to get her away from the attentions of Mr Kingcroft whom the mother-in-law sees as inappropriate. In Italy Lela meets and falls for Gino. Philip is despatched to Italy to bring her home but discovers that she has married and is expecting a child. She dies in childbirth.

End of Act One.

Now the in laws make it their duty to get the baby away from the father. Philip is despatched to Italy. Miss Abbott goes too and also Harriet, Philip’s stuffy sister. The charm of Italy is such that they cannot get Gino to give up the baby. They think money will do it. Miss Abbott, who blames herself for the whole thing, feels obliged to prize the baby away from the father but discovers that he does not want to lose the baby. She performs a volte-face and decides to leave the baby in Italy with its loving father. Harriet sees the second of two perfunctory and failed attempts by Philip to get Gino to return the baby and this seems to be the low-point, the ultimate reversal.

However, in Act Three, as it were, Harriet does something rash. Visiting the house to persuade Gino to hand over the baby, and finding no one in, she swipes the baby and with her companions tries to make a run for it. A neat plot-cranker employed by Forster at this point is to get them booked on a train at a particular time which introduces an extra level of tension. On their escape the carriage overturns and the baby is killed. Philip goes to tell Gino what has happened, despite having broken his elbow in the crash, and a fight ensues from which Miss Abbott, arriving late on the scene, rescues Philip.

Back in England a certain amount of time has passed. Harriet has recovered from losing her mind. Philip realises that he is in love with Ms Abbott but discovers that she loves Gino. However, relations with Gino are good and they may visit him in the future.

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Good things: passage of time

I’m Not Scared – Niccolo Amanniti

It starts off as a sort of teen movie: a group of friends, children, in Tuscany playing together during the summer when a dare, a race, produces an unexpected surprise for one of the friends. The child characters can be said to be somewhat stock characters, a bully, a loser, an everyman (the boy from whose viewpoint we see everything), a fat girl, a clever kid. A house encountered by the group reveals the secret which the main boy keeps to himself and nurtures throughout the rest of the book.

The extraordinary world, if you want to use that concept, is the new imaginative world created by the discovery. They don’t move to a different town, country, whatever, but the world in the boy’s head is changed utterly.

Also, where a lot of novels start with a sort of stasis and return to it changed at the end, this novel never resolves in that way, ending on an intensely dramatic point. We can imagine what the world after this will be like but the author doesn’t conduct us back to that world.

The lay out of the paragraphs on the page reminded me of James Ellroy or David Peace as it has very short paragraphs sometimes only a sentence long. However, it does not use their rhetorical repetitiveness to have an effect and gets enough of the internal world of the boy into this style. Not that Ellroy and Peace don’t achieve this, they do, but like them a lot is conveyed by a little, the style is pared down, simple but still full of colour and visual power. It also reminded me a bit of Paul Auster because it is so plot driven and compelling. I imagine the author created his premise, his situation, and then pushed to see where it would go. Auster’s books seem like this, not always concerned with thematic material but with plot and the pleasures of it.

I haven’t analysed the stages of the plot but may do in time.