Though Galsworthy at the drop of an opera hat loves suddenly to shift into overblown fancypants rhetorical wibbling mode : In very truth this is a droll, satirical high toned soap opera, and nothing essentially wrong with that. It’s a maddening but very deliberate withholding of information in a novel that is otherwise happy chucking great balefuls of information out of the back of the brougham. So if we want to know why exactly she began to loathe her husband, we will have to guess. He is happy to let us into the workings of the minds of many characters, but not Irene. Everything is property – houses, stocks and shares, mortgages, manufactories, and, yes, wives – the main tale of woe here is the decline and fall of Soames’ marriage to Irene, and how the wife is the property of the husband.

And certainly not the poor - their part in this saga is to set the table and bring in the soup and a bottle of the best champers and be brisk about it.Ģ. The upper middle class (not the middle middle, and not the lower upper). Not for one moment are we in any doubt about what this novel is interested in :ġ. John Galsworthy, our ever-affable, ultra-clubbable narrator, gradually, at a leisurely strolling pace (this is not a hard boiled crime story), unfolds, with the use of many, many commas, clauses and even, a stumbling-block for the modern reader, a free hand with the semi-colon, the situation of this nobby gang of Forsytes. So really you can only look at the family tree when you’ve read all nine novels in the saga. Because (of course!) it’s stuffed with spoilers – this person marries that person, that one divorces this one and marries her instead.

Some of whom have seven or eight of their own and so on.īut my advice is, however helpful this family tree seems to be, DON’T LOOK AT IT. To get this pack of Forsytes into your head, then, you may consult the family tree helpfully printed at the front of the book, where you will see that the original Jolyon Forsyte had TEN children The first couple of chapters overwhelm the humble reader with Too Many Damn Characters, all of whom appear to be 75 years old.

John galsworthy the man of property