Only connect!

[regshoe]

I've been in a bit of a reading slump for a couple of weeks, and I decided to drag myself out of it by re-reading Howards End, a book I love very much. I think it's probably E. M. Forster's best book, and it would be my favourite if it wasn't for The Longest Journey (which I adore unreasonably).

I don't feel coherent enough about it to write a proper review, but here are some scattered thoughts:

• The whole thing is very much temperamentally conservative, without being at all friendly to political conservatism (to the point where it almost feels wrong to call Wilcoxes 'conservative', although it's how they think of themselves these days). As someone who is (/likes to think I am) politically and socially progressive, it's easy to feel frustrated by the sense that I can't have those 'conservative' values (it's better for life to be slow and quiet, places are important, particular history is important, telegrams and anger bad, etc.) without a whole load of other, utterly horrible ones, and this book is a much needed reminder of how false that is.
• Places are important! A thousand square miles are not a thousand times better than one square mile. The idea that the 'civilisation of luggage'—the tendency of the modern middle classes (in 1910, but I think you could just as easily, if not more so, say the same now) to treat places as fungible and meaningless and to see constantly moving around as unremarkable and harmless—is a bad thing connected to real, serious loss was something I really needed to hear someone else taking seriously when I first read this book, and it's still a great comfort now.
• It contains no overtly supernatural elements, and still manages to be one of the most compelling, beautiful and fitting ghost stories I've ever read.
• The writing style is utterly gorgeous. As well as the individual beautiful poetic passages (perhaps a little overdone in places, but I can forgive them that), I love the way Forster picks up a few central phrases and images—'telegrams and anger', 'panic and emptiness', 'only connect', 'goblin footfalls', and so on—and repeats and echoes them in pivotal places throughout the book. It gives a real sense of symbolic weight that's at the same time interwoven with the surface of the story, its characters and events. I think this is a book that does a very good job, on the whole, of working on multiple levels at once.
• Forster's determined and unequivocal anti-car sentiment. He's right and I support him.
• Margaret and Helen Schlegel are two of my favourite characters in literature. I love them both in all their complications and contradictions and differences.
• I have seen the Merchant Ivory film adaptation and it's very good—I thought it captured the mood of the book wonderfully. I have not seen the more recent miniseries adaptation, and am now considering watching it. Has anyone seen it, and if so do you think it's any good?

Anyway, I'm now reading George Monbiot's How Did We Get Into This Mess? and trying to do a compare-and-contrast on the political and social values. It's great fun, if somewhat depressing.