Where Angels Fear to Tread - E M Forster

 I was put off E M Forster by the fuss surrounding the publication of Maurice in the early Seventies, then all those arch Merchant-Ivory movies that brought in the era of the aristocratic actor.  Not my sort of thing at all.  Nowadays I am more tolerant.  All I want is an author with a voice and style that stands out in the crowd.  Forster certainly has that.   Where Angels Fear to Tread a black comedy that pivots on two tragic deaths but nevertheless manages to maintain an atmosphere of genteel social satire.

The young widow Lilia and her companion Miss Caroline Abbott leave one of the quieter and more rural suburbs of 1904-5 London for a tour of Italy, suggested by the effete pretensions of her mollycoddled brother in law Philip Herriton.  Before long the Herritons receive the ghastly news that Lilia has become engaged to a young Italian - and fellow not only young and Italian but the son of that social anomaly a rustic dentist!  Italianate Philip is despatched to put a stop to this nonsense, only to find Lilia and her Gino are already married.

Worse news follows within the year.  Lilia has not only given birth to Gino's son, she has died doing so.   Her former mother-in-law Mrs Herriton does what any respectable middleclass Englishwoman would.  She sends Philip and his bluestocking sister Harriet to buy the baby from its father and bring it home.   Miss Abbott, meanwhile, feels obliged to involve herself in the enterprise.

Key to the novel's success is its brevity, only 160 pages in this iconic Penguin Modern Classic edition.  It would be difficult to maintain the comic element any longer.  Yet in that narrow space Forster manages to cram deep insight into all his main characters (and plenty into the deftly-drawn supporting cast).  The action romps along and yet all the pre-work, the structure essential to the farce, is in place.  If not quite a masterpiece, Where Angels Fear to Tread is arguably a significent work by a supreme master.

Juan in America - Eric Linklater

Eric Linklater is not a name on literary lips these days, but in his prime he was enormously popular and critically highly regarded. His wartime radio plays for the BBC were seen as so important to the war effort that they were discussed in broadsheet editorials. His third novel, Juan in America, was a bestseller and whilst it may seem entirely fanciful, Linklater's own travels as a young man were even more incredible - India, China, and indeed America. This is a novelist who knows whereof he writes.

I don't know, but I suspect his work and amatory experiences were not quite so varied as Juan's, who goes from college football hero to bum to slinger of hash, bootlegger, ice cream dispenser, upside-down opera singer and movie extra, and whose conquests include an Amazonian acrobat and a gangster's daughter.

Juan is a direct descendant of Byron's Don Juan. He shares the Don's taste for adventure and the ladies without being either predatory or amoral. He is a likeable companion as we follow his picaresque travels. There are occasional affronts to modern taste - Linklater's handling of black people is not what we would wish, though it has to be remembered that he was writing in America in 1931 and in many ways reflects the attitudes of East Coast Ivy Leaguers of that era. Read closely enough and you realise that, whilst he doesn't seem to rate his impoverished black characters as individuals, he does empathise with their historical plight, "the result of forcibly transporting a people from one continent to another, using them in slavery for several generations, and then bestowing on them a nominal freedom and a position beyond the pale of society."

All in all, Juan in America is a splendid example of English picaresque from the first half of the 20th century. As such, Linklater's rivals in the field were not Huxley or Forster but Priestley and Mackenzie, neither of them particularly popular these days either. But Juan in America has never been out of print in the eighty years since it was written, and that has to be the best kind of recommendation.