But the splendours of Forster’s quiet moral art are all there waiting. It doesn’t yet have the assured touch of his later triumphs. And you can see the brilliant daring of Forster start to emerge and unfurl its wings to dry in the Italian sun. But for all the imbalance of the plot and self-consciousness of some of the writing, it’s still shot through with excellent moments. As to the story, it strikes-as it would for a first novel by a young man-as a kind of proto version of the much more beautiful and compelling novels to come. Even this is as well handled as it might be by the reader. A fine performance, particularly given the mess of melodrama Forster, somewhat uncharacteristically, stumbles into and around towards the end of the book. At first I was a little resistant to Edward Petherbridge’s cut glass accent but, in the end, his fine-toned and surprisingly sensitive, tender restraint won me round. There are other good readings of Forster, by women and men.
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