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Oh, the mellifluous, soothing voice of Forster! I don’t know what it is, but something just kicks into place in my innermost recesses when I read his best novels. Stephen King has said that it’s the writers we read when we are young who impact us the most, perhaps in ways we don’t always realize. That may be why it’s more than just a reading experience to me when I read Forster; I feel that I meet not only my younger self but my true self when I read him.

Maurice is the novel Forster wrote some 55 years before it was published because the time he lived in was one of hypocrisy and intolerance. Indeed, Maurice, the main character, refers to himself a couple of times as one of the unmentionable Oscar Wilde types, and we know what happened to Oscar Wilde only a decade or so previously. Forster had a view which there was no room for, cf. the title of another of his novels, and only a few of his closest friends saw the novel in his own lifetime.

The novel is about Maurice’s seemingly impossible search for happiness in a world where homosexuality is illegal and in an England which is still marred by a rigid view of class distinctions. It is a brave attempt to paint a possible utopia which, sadly, Forster himself never lived to see, and it is a touching portrait of two people’s ultimate refusal to bow to the expectations of the times, as well as one man’s claim to have been able to change his sexuality.

Like Zadie Smith, I can see that Forster sometimes borders on the mawkish and the sentimental, but like Smith, I really don’t care. His works remind me that it is possible to write feelingly and touchingly about human relations within the relatively narrow confines of literary fiction. All of Forster’s works are about his humanistic vision, and wish, that we ‘only connect�. I am unapologetic in my love of Forster, and I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.