TL:DR A) I don’t really like books about people with no faith. B) A man can be a terrible husband but a good father. C) Romeo and Juliet is an eternal trope but the people involved, parents included, can get very annoying and stupid.  

Please note that I took one class in literature in college. One. So you are warned. 

I recently skimmed a book where the characters did not believe in God. They just took for granted that all that stuff meant nothing. They accepted contraception, and the book featured a fairly poisonous relationship involving a man who thought he could own another person. It also featured a sort of authorial lie. What I mean by that is, that a character, trying to explain people’s motives to another character says something that simply isn’t true, within the book! And yet, this untruth is supposed to be a central point in explaining the actions that were taken in the book. So I am holding the author responsible, rather than the character. 

In case this sounds like a very modern book, it’s actually the first three books of The Forsyte Saga. I read the whole thing forty or fifty years ago, and this time I skimmed a great deal. Maybe I did then too. I don’t remember. Lengthy descriptions of bachelor Timothy’s house and drawing room, for example, where the family gathered for fifty years or so, are not my cup of tea. And honestly, although I tried, the description of the house that Bosinney, the architect, builds for Soames and Irene, did not hold my attention as totally as it should have. I can tell you that it is in total opposition to Timothy’s house. 

I had two very specific reactions to the story this time around. 

I have spent a lot of time on Project Gutenberg along with its Australian counterpart in the past few years. As a result I have read a fair amount of hundred year old stuff, some better, some worse. In either case, someone cared enough about it, relatively recently, to get it online. I’ve read two books that involved girls going off to be independent and modern and live with a guy without benefit of marriage — and it turns out badly in the ways you would expect. What they do afterwards varies a bit and then WWI changes everything. Another, set in China, featured a girl who was determined to have nothing to do with men, until some rampage from around 1915 catches up with her and her Chinese mission. She ends up crossing China and Russia to get back to England. She travels in the company of a young man who seems more and more admirable and attractive to her, and then he’s killed in the Baltic by a German submarine. I think they kissed before he went down. 

The effect of all this reading is to show that Galsworthy, the author of the Forsyte saga written in 1921, had to set his book before the turn of the 20th century to start with, or else Irene, as a character, is way too unbelievable. *** 

When the Romeo and Juliet motif becomes apparent, Romeo/Jolyon IV’s dad, also known as Jolyon and married to Irene who is Jolyon IV’s mother, writes to his son to explain why he should not marry Juliet/Fleur. It’s complicated because Romeo didn’t even know his mother had been divorced, let alone that Fleer’s father was the Other Man. Jolyon II says that girls used to be brought up without any understanding of sex at all, so they couldn’t know that they would absolutely hate being married to a particular person until the catastrophe comes upon them. At that point they have to get a divorce because life isn’t fair otherwise. He carefully points out that Irene for all practical purposes was Soames possession, and this isn’t the way to deal with human beings. Okay. 

But! Irene did know she couldn’t stand to have Soames touch her. There is a specific passage before she says yes to Soames’ constant proposals, obviously before they were married, where Soames kisses her wrist, and she shudders. She refused to face this knowledge on some level, because she felt she had few choices as a poor but proud woman. This is what I call the authorial lie above. However, since refusing to face facts before they bring disaster is a specialty of these characters, I could be wrong about whether this is the author or the character making the mistake.  

The other specific reaction I had comes from how very, very insular these characters are, again, especially the women. No American girl on the frontier could possibly be so dumb about how babies come about. Most of the world, in fact, took care of animals and would have some basic facts available. But the ideas that Galsworthy put out, so specific to this context, are discussed as if they had world wide applicability. Oddly, Soames, the villainous husband makes what I would call the correct decision when his second wife is having trouble giving birth. The doc says, if I forget about the baby I can bring your wife out of this quickly and safely. Soames says, no, try to keep the baby also. His reasons are not good but the action is correct. 

I thought of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach”, written in the 1870’s

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

I felt that the characters in this Saga were all totally lost. No-one had an anchor. No-one grew. Soames showed a different side of himself as father rather than husband but he didn’t grow as a husband. It is faintly interesting to be reminded of how long ago the rot set in. Whatevs…

*** The Forsyte saga is well-written but it shares a flavor with a lot of books of the time. Extra examples of trope sharing… Anne of Green Gables is a lovely book but there is a trope of the special young girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm proves it.

Ditto with The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Old gentleman who takes the part of the plucky but down on their luck family? Check out a lot of Louisa May Alcott.  The Railway Children also falls into this category.