E. M. Forster’s novel is broken up into two parts. The first part of the story is about Lucy Honeychurch going aboard to Italy with her ultra-polite and decorum-obsessed manipulative spinster cousin, Miss Bartlett. In Italy, Lucy meets a motley cast of characters including Miss Lavish (a talentless aspiring female novelist),  the Miss Alans (two spinster sisters who are visiting Italy for their health), Mr Emerson and George Emerson (father and son who lack social manners and support socialist ideals), Mr Beebe (a laid-back clergyman), and Mr Eager (a stiff old-fashioned clergyman). Instead of the trip being one of sight-seeing and reveling in the glorious masterpieces of the past, Lucy’s trip is spoiled after witnessing a murder, getting her first kiss by the impetuous George Emerson among a field of violets, and being abandoned by her various chaperones as she faces these ordeals.

The second part takes place three months later. Lucy has returned home to the English countryside and has accepted the marriage proposal of Cecil, a rich Londoner, who despises the country. During their engagement she soon finds her new fiance criticizing everything she once loved and found charming in the countryside and her childhood (even her own family). The Emersons from her Italy trip also move into the neighborhood. George Emerson still has feelings for her and helps her see that Cecil is a pompous ass who will stifle her individuality and force her to think like him. She breaks off the engagement, almost travels to Greece to run away from her problems, but realizes she returns George’s feelings. This leads them to run off to Italy together to get married against the wishes of Lucy’s family who disown her.

The novel deals with the way drawing room culture and breeding stifles individuality and the character’s true emotional desires.  Lucy is trained as a little girl to follow certain expectations and codes of conduct, at the expense of her own happiness. Initially, her feelings towards George are ones of complete confusion; she is unable to make sense of her feelings because they contradict her upbringing to dislike an ill-bred boy who would just randomly decide to kiss her at an inappropriate moment. Passion is contrasted with decorum. Even arrogant prigs like Cecil who the reader comes to despise due to his arrogant behavior comes to realize that the way he has been raised in London prevents him from ever developing true intimate relationships with anyone.

The Emersons who represent passion are called “ill-bred” throughout the novel; they lack proper social decorum because they have no respect for drawing room codes of conduct in which so many other characters in the novel put heavy stock.  Even the way the various characters view art emphasize this divide between passion and proper decorum; the upper-class characters never have an emotional reaction to the art in Italy, but talk about artist’s “tactile” ability as if talking about a cold science. Lucy avoids nude images at the beginning, even claiming Botticelli’s Birth of Venus suffers in merit due to the presence of a nude figure, because it goes against proper decorum and the repressed sexuality of her society.

I want to say I enjoyed E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View, but I would be lying. I found the book dreadfully boring. They were some of the longest two hundred pages of my life. Forster is a decent enough writer, but lacks the stylistic originality of Shakespeare, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce. So while he isn’t terrible by any means, he’s also nothing special on a prose level. This then leaves plot to keep me hooked. Unfortunately not much happens in the book. Most of the novel consists of characters talking about one another other or talking about nothing at all. I tend to like books where this is done successfully; one such example would be Jane Austen’s novels. However, in Austen’s novel there is tangible movement. Too many chapters in this novel feel like they don’t earn their space and fail to really move the plot forward in any significant way. Essentially the main plot events consist of going to Italy and the kiss, and then engagement with Cecil, Mr. Emerson moves into the neighborhood, followed by the breaking of the engagement. The biggest problem of all is that Forster’s characters consist of superficial and thin archetypes. What exactly do we really know about George? He grew up under a socialist father, believes in women’s rights, is passionate about life, and otherwise doesn’t talk much throughout the rest of the novel. So why should I care whether he ends up with Lucy or not. The characters are never developed enough for me to care about their fates. As the introduction to my edition points out, Forster himself once admitted in a lecture that his characters could be substituted with the characters from pretty much any other novel and nothing would be loss. Characters are the life-blood of writers like Shakespeare and Austen, while in this novel they function more like the most soporific opiate.  I can never forget characters like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, etc., while Lucy Honeychurch and company are easily forgotten as thin archetypes with more interesting counterparts in a thousand other better written and developed novels.

Apparently I’m one of the few book bloggers who didn’t enjoy E.M Forster’s A Room With a View. Matt over at A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook calls the book “more than a love story–it’s a social comedy that satirizes the hypocrisy, and a personal odessey to self-revelations and truth of the body, which enables her to see the bottom of her soul and see the whole of everything at once.” Tony from Tony’s Reading Listsaid, “after finishing this short and sweet example of understated Edwardian fiction, I am very tempted to go after some more of his books before the end of the year.” Emily Jane at Booked All Week expressing a bit more reservations said that she, “liked the tone of the book; it was light and airy. . . .But it really wasn’t much more than pleasant for me. A nice enough way to spend an afternoon or two, but nothin’ I was too excited about.”