The White Monkey (The Forsyte Saga)
by John Galsworthy
The White Monkey
by
John Galsworthy
|
|
| published
|
1972
by Ballantine Books
|
| binding
| Mass Market Paperback |
| isbn
|
034502611X
|
| date added
|
03-23-07
|
|
Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of The White Monkey.
friend reviews (0)
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
other reviews
(showing 1-7 of 7)
bookshelves:
read-in-2008
Read in March, 2008
Well, it's hard to sustain the same level of brilliance across multiple novels and, much as I remembered, Volume 4 is where Galsworthy begins to falter. The White Monkey is inferior to the three volumes that precede it on several counts. At the most fundamental level, the plot is wafer-thin: very little of consequence happens in this book, to any of the characters. Also, the Forsytes no longer occupy the central role that they played in the initial trilogy - of his generation, only Soam...more
Well, it's hard to sustain the same level of brilliance across multiple novels and, much as I remembered, Volume 4 is where Galsworthy begins to falter. The White Monkey is inferior to the three volumes that precede it on several counts. At the most fundamental level, the plot is wafer-thin: very little of consequence happens in this book, to any of the characters. Also, the Forsytes no longer occupy the central role that they played in the initial trilogy - of his generation, only Soames and Winifred maintain much of a presence, Jon and Irene are an ocean and a continent away, so that this book shifts its focus to concentrate more or less exclusively on Soames's daughter, Fleur. Problem is that the new characters - Fleur's husband, Michael Mont, and his family, his war buddy, the poet Wilfrid Desert, the artists and writers who populate Fleur's salon never rise above the level of cardboard cutout figures, dragged on stage in an obvious effort by Galsworthy to cover all his bases. There is a ridiculously clunky subplot involving a worker, Bicket, who is let go from Michael Mont's firm, and his wife, which might as well be sequestered off in its own optional section, with the label "travails of the working class".
So, a lot of quivering and soul-searching by Fleur as she reluctantly comes to the conclusion that she's not going to be able to manage to juggle husband and passionate admirer (Desert) successfully; further soul-searching about whether or not to have a child, all carried out in the presence of some kind of hideous lapdog, Ting-a-Ling. It's never a good sign when the Chinese lapdog is one of the more memorable characters in a book.
With an odd 15-page coda ("A Silent Wooing") to fill us in on Jon's progress. He's living in North Carolina now! He meets an American girl! They get married! Neither seems to have a discernible personality! If there's not a payoff in Book 6 for wading through all this boring stuff, I'll be really pissed off.
The book's title? Refers to a painting which Galsworthy uses as a symbol with which to bludgeon the reader.
Let's hope things improve in Volume 5, though I seem to remember that he doesn't actually regain his original form until the sixth book....less
book data (includes all editions)
avg rating
(all editions):
2.75 (4 ratings)
avg rating
(this edition): 2.75
(4 ratings)
number of reviews: 1
other editions
[close]
The White Monkey (Paperback)
isbn: 1410105040
quote
"Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it."
more quotes »
