The Man of Property by John Galsworthy: Review
Book: The Man of Property. Date of Publication: January 1, 1906. Pages: 364. Genre: Historical Fiction
Our story follows the Forsytes. They are a new money family only a couple generations removed from their farming ancestors. What has propelled their success is, in large part, a lack of sentimentality and a single minded acquisitiveness. Everything that is worth anything to them falls into the mold of “property”. From their four percent business interests to the paintings by well-regarded artists that they stack up in their residences to their wives. In this way Soames Forsyte is an exemplar of his clan. He has a successful career as a solicitor and a beautiful wife, Irene. He is taken by her at their first meeting. With the doggedness of a hard-fought negotiation he pursues her and gains her hand in marriage. On her part she, the daughter of a professor, has no assets of her own and it is heavily implied that she is pressured into the marriage by her stepmother. Irene makes no attempts to hide her total lack of affection for Soames and the scandal that starts The Man of Property is news that she is asking to sleep in separate rooms.
Soames believes it is his cousin June who has put the idea into his wife’s head. To repair their relationship (and to isolate Irene from her circle) he commissions June’s fiancee Phillip Bosinney to build them a house on the outskirts of the city. Phillip is an unpretentious architect looking for a major project to make his name. The disastrous love affair between him and Irene is the scandal that eventually breaks up the Forsyte family.
I recently watched Mina Le’s excellent video booktok & the hotgirlification of reading on “high brow” versus “low brow” literature which got me thinking about this book in particular. In its own time John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga was divisive. It won its author a Nobel Prize for insightful social commentary. It was also criticized by some of his contemporaries as lacking depth and character. So many points of judgement seem to skew based on perception. See if the knowledge that the saga was adapted into an immensely popular daytime television show in the 1960s leads you in one direction or another.
I have the omnibus edition released to accompany a later adaptation to film. Directly after the preface and the table of contents is a family tree. This has the same energy as sci-fi/fantasy novels which open with a map of the land. Or historical fiction which opens with a centuries-long timeline of significant events. Now, is this a sign of ambition or a pretension that makes your eyes roll into the back of your head?
John Galsworthy was a social activist who worked for womens’ rights and labor reform, among other causes. In The Man of Property, Soames is angered by the snide comments of an acquaintance who asks about his wife’s entanglement with his architect. In a fit of jealousy he rapes Irene in an incident that is delicately put by the Forsytes as “asserting his marital rights.” Her torturous cries echo in his ears the following day. Now, is this advocacy during a time when this would not have been treated as a crime or an exploitative depiction of abuse?
As retribution against Phillip, Soames files suit to make him liable for the three hundred and fifty pounds over budget he has gone on the house. To Soames it is an annoyance. To Bosinney it is ruinous. This, coupled with news of Irene’s assault, drives Phillip into a despair that leads him to die under the wheels of a bus. Irene, who had left Soames to be with Phillip, comes back to him, having nowhere else to go.
She had come back then of her own accord, to the cage she had pined to be free of…he looked at her, huddled like a bird that is shot and dying, whose poor breast you see panting as the air is taken from it, whose poor eyes look at you who have shot it, with a slow soft, unseeing look, taking farewell of all that is good — of the sun, and the air, and its mate.
[Pg. 293]
Now, is this poignant or soap-opera melodrama?
