John Galsworthy – The Forsyte Saga

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Book Review, Family Saga, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“An intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men”

I had never seen either the landmark 1967 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, starring Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter and Kenneth More as the three points of the major love story triangle, nor the 2002 remake with Damien Lewis, Gina McKee and Rupert Graves, but I did, I thought, know the story, despite not having read Galsworthy’s 3 volume epic, with two interludes.

Though originally published as a complete set as ‘The Forsyte Saga’ in 1922, Galsworthy had been writing his saga of an upper middle class family for over 15 years as the first volume The Man of Property had been published in 1906. In fact, he continued to follow the generations of Forsytes in the writing of a second trilogy The Modern Comedy between 1924 and 1928, and then a third three volume set, End of the Chapter, between 1931 and 1933.

Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter, Kenneth More

And I must say, that though some aspects (for example the laying out of details of matters financial and legal in terms of entails, wills, investments, death duties and the like) had me reading without due focus and attention, I found this a fascinating, absorbing, moving read. Characters are wonderfully drawn, shown in complexity, and the rifts, risings and fallings of society itself, as followed through the generations of one particular family, which in this first trilogy of Galsworthy’s three trilogies, spans the period 1886 to 1920, works brilliantly

Damien Lewis, Gina McKee, Rupert Graves

We start in the high stability and certainty, with this family, in the Victorian era. Two generations earlier the Forsytes had been settled in Dorset, farmers. Now they are men of property, solicitors, financiers, investors, doing very well for themselves. The ‘old generation’ whose fortunes are first followed, are the ten, very wealthy, sons and daughters of “Superior Dosset” Forsyte, who became a builder, and amassed the family wealth through property

The first book, The Man of Property, begins with an engagement party gathering, of the great-grand daughter of Superior Dosset (long deceased) The family fortunes, togetherness and standing are at their height.  It is 1886 The last volume of this first trilogy is the marriage of a much younger great-grand daughter of Superior Dosset, one who is part of that giddy generation of flappers, young men and women fortunate enough to have been born a little too late to have engaged in the 1914-18 war

The main protagonists and driving forces in the novel are two cousins, very different from each other, ‘Young’ Jolyon Forsyte, an artist, son of Old Jolyon, a tea merchant and chairman of various companies, and Soames, the son of solicitor James. Old Jolyon and James, now elderly men are 2 of the 10 children of Superior Dosset. Soames, The Man Of Property believes in ownership – whether of artefacts – he is a successful speculator in art collection – or of people. Soames is married to the much younger Irene, an unwilling kind of femme fatale, purely because she is an eternal kind of beauty – of soul, as much as of body.

Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it?

The artist Young Jolyon has a different kind of worship of beauty – whether of people, or of art, nature, or any other manifestation of beauty – that it cannot be owned

it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine, sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance, within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!

A struggle goes on between what Galsworthy terms ‘the Forsyte nature’ as typified by Soames – those aspects of society which seek to own, confine, regulate, and are cautious, rational, and repress or are uncomfortable with mystery, and what art seeks, meaning beyond the tangible.

the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

I can’t and won’t say more about the strong narrative, the complexities and contradictions of character, and how the author is able to look at changes in culture, thinking, the progress of science and industry, politics, and much more through his complex family saga. He writes crisply and prosaically when needed, but, my how he also soars with metaphor, as appropriate

Suffice it to say, I have pages and pages of underlinings – Galsworthy’s truly epic piece of work is one of those which, as much as the reader would like to read on, read on, in order to discover ‘what happens next’, they are bound, if they really want to get the richness of the books, to stop, reflect, and absorb everything which the author is exploring

The Forsyte Saga UK
The Forsyte Saga USA

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Jane Smiley – Early Warning

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Book Review, Early Warning, Family Saga, Jane Smiley, Last Hundred Years Trilogy, Novels about America

The low-level hum of a mushroom cloud

At the conclusion of my review of Some Luck, the first volume of Jane Smiley’s trilogy of 100 years of America, as seen through a single farming family from Iowa , I wrote the following :

It was when I finished Some Luck, and sat down to think about what Smiley had done, and the manner of her doing it, that I realised how brilliantly the novel had been crafted. She is not a writer who stuns with her showy brilliance, but one who, when you stop and look at the piece, has crafted beautifully, properly, harmoniously. There is integrity to her work. And I can’t wait for volume 2, which will cover the 50’s to the 80’s, and where, I suspect, the sense of timelessness which still clung to the early part of Some Luck, will be wrenched asunder

And now, having concluded Early Morning, the second volume, I see no reason to change my earlier opinion about Smiley’s qualities as a writer, nor the difference I thought there would be between the world of Some Luck and the world of Early Morning.

Though Joe, the second son of the initial patriarch and matriarch, Walter and Rosanna Langdon, by continuing to be the one who connects to place, whose prevailing love is the land itself, does seem to try to hold to roots and to history, farming itself is completely different from the scratched out, un-mechanised work his father did.

The focus in Early Warning is the second generation and beyond, that generation affected by the Second World War, the Cold War, whose children would feel the effects of Vietnam, the sexual revolution, gay rights, feminism, the civil rights movement, enormous social and cultural changes.

Smiley continues to allocate a year per chapter, and in that year will snapshot various members of the family, their wider families, friends and work relationships.

I have stayed utterly absorbed. She looks at her individuals in close-up, their lives, loves, and place in society, but at the same time, each of them stands for more. This is both a marvellous narrative, and at the same time a snapshot of society.

There is of course a challenge for the reader who has not read the first volume, as some of the references won’t quite make the same emotional impact, stir the same memories as they will for those who experienced the characters now at centre stage as babies, toddlers, adolescents, young men and women whose natures were forming.

And there are also some challenges simply because you are following several stories, several lives, across thirty years, so it’s harder work for the reader to hold all these stories which are simultaneously going on.

Reese Homestead, photo by Karen Reese Bird from
Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation Site

But the tapestry is, to my mind, a gorgeous and richly patterned one, and what makes it work is Smiley’s integrity, her interest in her characters, and her resistance to going for the easy option of just bombarding the reader with high drama on every page. She is as interested in the small detail of small lives as in the actions happening on a world stage – in fact, more so, as it is the effect of the world stage on the daily lives of ordinary people that form the fabric of this.

I do have one small criticism, to do with the way Smiley, or her editors, have chosen to help the reader keep track of the expanding characters across the generations, as marriages, partnerships, the families of the partners and new births happen. This is done at the start of the book via a family tree which takes the reader from book 1 to the end of this book. This takes an element of surprise from the story, as it might give clues as to who for example lives and who might die, early, simply because they leave no heirs, and we might, given knowledge of the first book, and the time of the second, be able to work out why. As the children of Frank, Joe, Lillian and the others reach maturity we might also be able to predict immediately that someone who appears on the scene as a partner for one of the children is not going to be ‘significant’ simply because the format of the family tree tells you who is going to be the partner who fathers the next generation.

I would have liked to see something along the lines of a tree which gave birthdates, and where applicable, deathdates of all the family in 1953 when this book starts, but no indication of any later births, partnerships etc. And perhaps a ‘mini-tree’ at the end of each year which might record only any changes which happened that year – deaths and births – and which could then be a chapter conclusion, easily found in the book, or in an e-reader, which would be a useful way for the reader to keep track of the ages of the appearing (or departing) characters, and their relationships in the tree at large.

‘Relationships’ being of course a major thread of this book. The land itself, however changed by fashion and global economy, and the lives of family members, however changed by global scattering far from that Iowan beginning, exert tendrils and roots which bind them together.

The title of this book nods to that fear which formed a low-level background, and some-times a right-up-close-and-personal stuff of nightmares, from the Bay of Pigs onwards.

buzzards, flicr, non-commercial use photo by George Pankewytch

Smiley does that shivering thing, where the characters (and the reader) are deep in the minutiae of day-to-day, skating on the thin-ice surface, and suddenly, some film gets whisked aside, and you are face to face with ‘here be monsters’:

What he remembered….was standing near one of the windows and being revisited by a feeling from that trip he took for Arthur to Iran; at the sight of buzzards feasting in the moonlight on some carcass, say a goat, he had known all of a sudden how little intervened between the hot breeze on that runway and death itself. Death had shimmered in the air – as close as his next breath – and in that satin-draped consulate, looking out on Sixty-ninth street, he had felt that once again. Now, he thought, right now, at the Russian Tea Room, it was even closer, if still beyond the boundary. The thought made his hand resting on the table look vivid, still, pale like marble

And no doubt, the times and the changes will run even faster, not to mention the scatterings, despite global communications, become even more dizzying, when the third volume takes on the age of the world-wide-web, social media and all the rest.

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine programme UK. Publication date is the 28th April USA/7th May in the UK

Early Warning Amazon UK
Early Warning Amazon USA

Jane Smiley – Some Luck

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Book Review, Family Saga, Jane Smiley, Mid-West America, Novels about America, Some Luck

A hundred years in the Mid-West, stirred through a family saga, and blending in the wide, wide world

Jane Smiley’s ‘Some Luck’ is Volume 1 of a trilogy, examining a tumultuous 100 years from just after the end of the Great War to 2020. Smiley does this by taking an ordinary family from Iowa, from mixed European settler stock, and following them forward through the generations, as children grow and become parents, and those children grow, in a world which is endlessly, rapidly in change.

Like Smiley’s Pulitzer prizewinning A Thousand Acres, this first volume of the trilogy shows the author as a writer with a deep connection to rural place and landscape, and to the powerful hold than ‘land’ can exert. She effortlessly shows how a story can be both deeply and uniquely personal, familial, and how the personal is always shot through with the ripples, tugs, and in-roads which the wider world and its history makes in the lives of each unique individual, as we all come from place, and live through time.

The structure of this first (and I assume the subsequent two) of the trilogy, takes each chapter looking at a year in the life of the family, exploring what is happening to them, in their relationships with each other, and their relationship with that world of which they are part. ‘Some Luck’ runs from 1920-1953

The central family is that of Walter Langdon, 25 in 1920, from Irish, Scottish, English settler heritage, a young farmer who had spent time in the Great War. His young wife Rosanna, from a German settler heritage has recently given birth to their first child, Frank.

Southern Iowa Drift Plain, Wiki Commons

The first few chapters present, stunningly, an inside into the mind of a small child, and the laying out of how personality is already clearly expressed. The relationships between parents, children, grandparents, the physical, rooted life in connection with the land, a sense of tradition, stability, and life unfolding in repeating spirals with change beginning to happen, faster and faster as the years roll by, is done with absolute assurance.

Things that he picked up, no matter how small, were removed from his grasp before he could give them the most cursory inspection, not to mention get them to his mouth. It seemed that he could never get anything to his mouth that he actually wanted to get there. Whatever he grabbed was immediately removed and a cracker was substituted, but he had explored all the features of crackers, and there was nothing more about them that he cared to find out

Smiley is in many ways a deceptively easy read. She tells a great story, and it’s clear this is and will be a marvellously absorbing narrative, an expose of social history, changing cultural landscapes, but she does this so apparently without effort, that there is never the sense of a character being manipulated to prove a point or to make something happen.

The influx of the wider world into the Langdon world, showing the effects of the depression of the 20’s, the move to war, the engagement of the second generation in that war, the rise of the Cold War, changing fashions in child care, the aspirations of modernity, a society where stability is giving way to rapid change, conservative capitalism versus consumerism, socialism, life post-Hiroshima and the shadow of the bomb, all this complexity is most beautifully revealed. Her book is as much educative social history as novel, without the history ever feeling like a information overload.

It was when I finished Some Luck, and sat down to think about what Smiley had done, and the manner of her doing it, that I realised how brilliantly the novel had been crafted. She is not a writer who stuns with her showy brilliance, but one who, when you stop and look at the piece, has crafted beautifully, properly, harmoniously. There is integrity to her work. And I can’t wait for volume 2, which will cover the 50’s to the 80’s, and where, I suspect, the sense of timelessness which still clung to the early part of Some Luck, will be wrenched asunder

as long as the words were not said…..(she) didn’t have to react, didn’t have to feel that thing that she was going to feel, that thing that was like an empty house with the windows smashed and the paint peeling and the pillars of the porch broken and the porch roof itself collapsing, which was something she had never seen, but became something she would never forget

Recommended, most highly recommended.

I received this as a digital review copy from the publishers

Some Luck Amazon UK
Some Luck Amazon USA