Irene, the daughter of an impecunious academic finally agrees to become Soamses’s wife to relieve her parents of worry for her future, and with the hope that she can conform to what Society expects of her. All too soon, the masquerade fails, and the novel’s plot begins the series of ill chance and losses that mount up into tragedy.
The opening scenes set the stage of the family foundations of seemingly pure materialism that are perfectly acceptable, if not universally admired by the British upper and middle classes of the first half of the 19thCentury. A large part of the Forsyte clan are together discussing their lives and times, and absent members. The stage is set for the dramas that will follow, with most of the exposition complete, the reader will immediately be able to recognize not just the characters, but the themes they embody.
Soames and Irene have an ironic and indissoluble connection that brings about the main events to follow. Soames is a man who cannot ignore beauty, and to all who meet her besides her husband, Irene seems to embody that quality. Man of business though he is, much of Soames's fortune goes into the acquisition of works of art. He justifies this passion to himself and in the view of others by buying paintings with an eye to profit. It is clear that if he sees a sufficient increase in monetary value, he is prepared to sell. The fact that he honestly enjoys the pictures and is passionately in love with his beautiful wife indicate that the beauty itself is the one value he cannot do without. He feels he must own the best and the most beautiful. A wife is automatically ranked with the most valuable possessions. We are never sure he entirely grasps this understanding even at the end of the tale, but it is that need to possess what he loves that becomes his undoing.
The span of time and change represented by a single family confirms the aptness of Saga in its title. Each time I finish it, I assume Galsworthy intended his reader to be aware of a slight curl to his lip and a twinkle in his eye at such a grandiose moniker.
Like most authors of his time, Galsworthy is a master wordsmith. His descriptions of nature are ravishing, his limning of his characters clear enough for a crime sketch artist to draw them. This descriptive artistry and the wonderfully revelatory dialogue show the reader within a hundred pages the contrasts and individuality of everyone who has anything to do with the advancing story of Soames and Irene, and also with the subplots enacted by other members of the Forsyte family. All are influenced by the motive principles of the Forsyte clan in general, Victorian society, and their admired Soames in particular.
If you have the kind of patience we grew up with, every word is worth your time. One of the outstanding attractions of this novel is that, however wrong-headed or selfish or vindictive someone is, the explanations if not the excuses, are fully laid bare. There isn’t a black or purely white individual in the hundreds of pages.
As a model of the fully rounded novelist’s artistry, I can’t think of a more satisfactory example. Humanity at its most sympathetic and vulnerable, and in some ways, its bravest. I’m sorry to have finished it — again.
©2013 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
The Forsyte Saga, Volume 1, Project Gutenberg
Pages: 1 · 2
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