A Room With a View
I recently read a bunch of EM Forster’s short fiction, which included a bunch of early sc-fi and speculative fiction, including The Machine Stops, which pretty much covered how everyone lived during COVID lockdown, except a hundred years in advance. People lived in underground bunkers, communicating over (what was basically) the internet, and nobody ever met in person or went to the surface, or even saw the point of doing those things. They relied on The Machine, which eventually, well, you can guess from the title. I’d also like to shout out a story where a bunch of picnickers experience time and space freeze and one of them witnesses the Devil. It was cool. Very unsettling.
So I started to think my impression of Forster might have been a little off. All I really knew, before reading the shorts, was the titles Howard’s End and A Room with a View. I had kind of assumed they were about upper-crust types having fancy dinners and facing the kinds of emotional problems that could be easily solved by having a conversation instead of trying to play six-dimensional social chess. I decided to find out, and A Room with a View was on Standard eBooks and also - bonus! - was about 100 pages long.
Now, having read it, it is about upper-crust types having emotional problems, but it’s also hilarious, and ultimately very uplifting. We start in Italy, where Lucy Honeychurch - a deliberately adorable, syrupy type of name - is on holidays with her spinster cousin Miss Bartlett, and also a priest they know is there for some reason. Their rooms are not nice. However, there is a working-class father and son (the Emersons) staying in the pension also who have nice rooms and offer to trade. Their rooms, you see, have a view. This kicks off a socially fraught explosion as Miss Bartlett refuses - can’t be in debt to the lower classes - while the priest accepts - can’t be rude - and Lucy is just flustered by the whole thing.
Lucy then goes on a trip with another woman, free-thinking novelist Miss Lavish, where she gets left alone with no guidebook and witnesses a murder. Stumbling away from the scene, she bumps into George Emerson (the son) who spirits her away. Later on the trip, just before they leave Italy, George kisses her.
Most of the rest of the book is the fallout from that. Miss Bartlett witnessed it, she told Miss Lavish, who wrote it into a novel. Lucy gets engaged to some controlling chump called Cecil. The Emersons move into a cottage nearby in a scheme that may or may not be Cecil trying to dunk on the poors. But really during all this, all she can think about is George. Even outside the text itself, the chapters are called:
- XVI: Lying to George
- XVII: Lying to Cecil
- XVIII: Lying to Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy, and the Servants
- XIX: Lying to Mr. Emerson
Two extraordinary things happen. Number one, Lucy has developed enough of a sense of self to call off her engagement. She tries to make a case that it’s not about George (one remains unconvinced), she makes plans to travel to Greece and just get a sense of herself. Number two, Cecil takes it like an absolute champ. He had been a bit of a dick up to this point, but upon getting dumped, he uses it as a point on which to self-reflect, realise that he is flawed, Lucy has made him a better man and that he has much to learn. He takes it with grace and goes off into the sunset. I somehow ended up with full respect for both of them.
Three extraordinary things, I suppose; Lucy actually marries George and is happy. She gets estranged from her family but they may or may not get over it and also kind of sucked anyway. Everyone wins!