From the Bookshelf of Mineola Library's 2012 FALL Reading Challenge…

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster, Fiction, Classics

E.M. Forster

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May 14, 2009 Suzanne Moore rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-2006, summer-challenge-picks

Where do angels fear to tread …?… maybe in the hearts and soul of man? Funny, as I listened to the last of this on audio tape in my car, my CD player kicked in. I just happened to have Jakob Dylan’s latest loaded and the song playing “Smile When You Call Me That” came through with this lyric: “Angels can walk I’ve seen it before. They turn handles, they open doors. They act like devils, now you’ve been warned. They’ll vanish when love is war”

In Forster’s novel Lilia, an English widow, leaves for Where do angels fear to tread …?… maybe in the hearts and soul of man? Funny, as I listened to the last of this on audio tape in my car, my CD player kicked in. I just happened to have Jakob Dylan’s latest loaded and the song playing “Smile When You Call Me That” came through with this lyric: “Angels can walk I’ve seen it before. They turn handles, they open doors. They act like devils, now you’ve been warned. They’ll vanish when love is war”

In Forster’s novel Lilia, an English widow, leaves for Italy on holiday. She welcomes the reprieve from her in-laws who have tried to control her behavior ever since they have known her. After her husband died, she was held at an even tighter rein for fear that she might remarry and take the child of her dead husband to be raised by another man.

While on vacation with Caroline, a traveling companion, Lilia’s daughter is left in the care of her mother-in-law. Three weeks after leaving Lilia meets and falls in love with Gino, son of an Italian dentist. When she writes that they are engaged, Philip, her brother-in-law is sent along to discourage the union. Philip arrives only to find that the marriage is already occurred.

As one would suspect, the union is doomed. Gino seems to have married Lilia only for her money. She tries to make the best of the spoiled marriage, by giving her new husband a son. When she dies in childbirth, he writes to tell her daughter about the little brother. The in-laws decide to go back to Italy and retrieve the baby. They feel that Gino isn’t fit to raise a child.

Caroline, the family friend, goes along to persuade Gino to give up the child. She has known Gino from the trip she took with Lilia. Only when she sees Gino with the baby, she begins to have feelings that she can’t deny. Caroline is now smitten with the Italian, and wishes to leave at once before her feelings get out of control. She knows how unhappy Lilia was in her marriage to Gino, but that doesn’t stop the attraction she now begins to realize.

Philip interferes and tragedy follows. (I’m stopping myself here, before I give away too much) I will leave you with the relationship I find between Dylan’s lyrics and Forster’s characters. You see, on the journey to recover the baby, Philip feels his heart leaning towards Caroline. Things don’t work out very well, and the ending is hauntingly, bittersweet. Maybe the attractions that Lilia, Gino, Caroline, and Philip felt came from devils disguised as angels. (“Fools rush in” ...Lucifer was a “fallen” angel) When the heart falls in sorrow, the war begins within… maybe these characters acted rash and the angels, if present, fled to safety leaving behind broken hearts, and broken dreams… these are my deep thoughts.
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