Forster wrote his classic book about the novel when he was 48 years old and had already published the five novels that had made him a famous English man of letters—‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, ‘The Longest Journey’, ‘A Room with a View’, ‘Howards End’, and ‘A Passage to India’.  Educated at Kings College, Cambridge, he traveled widely to Egypt, Greece, and India, and was part of several circles of writers and intellectuals many of them closeted  homosexuals.   He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature no fewer than 17 times without success.

‘Aspects of the Novel’ was based on the Clark Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge and named for William George Clark, a Shakespearean scholar who taught at Trinity for more than 30 years.  In those lectures, given in the spring of 1927, Forster takes the critic’s approach to the novel which he defines as any fiction in prose of more than 50,000 words, bounded by two mountains, that of Poetry and one of History and bounded on the third side by the Sea.  While the terms of the Clark lectures directs the speaker to address ‘the English novel’, Forster makes it clear in the Introduction that he will take liberties by including three authors whom he feels are superior to any English writer—Tolstoy for his ‘complete picture of man’s life both on its domestic and heroic side”, Dostoeyevski for his “exploration of man’s soul” and Proust for his “analysis of modern man’s consciousness.”

The book is full of wonderful observations and aphorisms, among my favorite is this comment in the Introduction:  “Books have to be read (worse luck for it takes a long time.); it is the only way of discovering what they contain…The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer.”  And there’s this comment: “the final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”  And then, Forster proceeds to illuminate his struggles as both reader, writer, and critic exploring in depth these seven ‘aspects’:  story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.

Quoting long passages from a series of two authors whom he was paired for contrast (e.g. George Eliot/Henry James; Jane Austen/Charles Dickens; George Meredith/Thomas Hardy), Forster discusses each of the seven aspects in detail identifying the demands that the author makes on the reader and emphasizing how different authors approach those demands.  For example, he differentiates between story (this event follows that event and is in turn followed by another event) and plot (why did this character take that course of action).  He points out that the key to the story is whether the reader wants to know what happens next.

The two chapters on ‘people’, what we would call characters, focuses on the unique element of knowability.  While in real life one can’t know the inner life of others, the author of a novel is granted that ability and depending on ‘point of view’ can share that knowledge of the characters’ hidden lives with the reader or not.  In a classic English manner, Forster reduces all of a character’s life to five elements:  birth, food, sleep, sex, love, and death. He points out that the first and last are, in anticipation of Nabokov’s ‘Speak Memory’, ‘darknesses’ and comments that love is far more consuming in the hands of writers than it is in real life.  His division of characters into ‘flat’ and ’round’ rings true with Dickens embracing the former and Austen the latter.

Perhaps his most radical observations relate to what t aspects he calls  prophecy and rhythm which he likens to a ray of sunlight striking a scene.  The sunlight illuminates elements that hitherto had been invisible and provides the reader with an experience similar to that of hearing a symphony and finding the music in its entirety produces a magical effect.  Forster feels that music is the art form most akin to the novel.

And on and on it goes in a particularly pleasant style that is easy to read and follow, perhaps because the work was originally delivered orally and has not been modified for this volume.  In a brief conclusion, Forster visualizes the authors of the future 200 years writing all together in one room and with incredible prophecy writes, “The change in their subject matter will be enormous; they will not change.  We may harness the atom, we may land on the moon, we may abolish or intensify warfare, the mental processes of animals may be understood; but all these are trifles, they belong to history not to art.  History develops, art stands still.  The novelist of the future will have to pass all the new facts through the old if variable mechanisms of the creative mind.”  A rather startling set of predictions about history, but given post-modern, surreal fiction, not spot on about writing.

One delicious element of this book was that I was finally able to nail down the source of one of my favorite quotes.  In the chapter on Plot in which he foreshadows the modernist movement in fiction through a book by Andre Gide, Forster writes that there’s an anecdote in wihich an old lady complains when asked to be logical, “Logic. Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”  I’ve used that line hundreds of times myself, though always with ‘how can I tell what I think till I read what I’ve written.”

This is a rather delightful book filled with Forster’s idiosyncratic quips, quibbles, and quirks.  Frozen in time when D.H, Lawrence was the bad boy among novelists, it offers timeless insights into how the novelist accomplishes his craft and how that craft results in the ‘shy, crab-like sideways movement’ that has the ability to fundamentally change human nature, not quickly but over long periods of time.  Keep reading, would be my summary of Forster’s message.