The Celestial Omnibus, by E.M. Forster

Published in 1923 (original), 2005 (this edition). 172 p.

Rating: 4.8 stars

Summary: There are six short stories, all dealing with the idea of imagination as the savior of a person’s life, or lack of imagination as the cause of literal or figurative death. All surround English characters, either at home, or abroad in Italy or Greece.

Review:

I will freely admit that the only reason I ever pick up a book of short stories is if I like the author as a novelist so much that I feel like I have to read everything they ever read (with the exception of Ethan Canin, whose story collections I picked up because of a movie based on one of his stories.) This book was no exception, with E.M. Forster being one of my favorite novelists. His history is perhaps more interesting than my review, so I’ll do a little overview to explain why I picked this book up in the first place. (As an aside, the fact that I have to explain Forster is a tragedy of the American schooling system. Everyone in England knows who he is, as they should.)

E.M. Forster belonged to the intellectual society known as the Bloomsbury Group, who lived and worked in England (London and Sussex.) Along with Forster, the group included: Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Desmond MacCarthy. They were an elitist group that dabbled culturally in painting, economics, aestheticism (if you’re ever feeling super-intellectual, check out Clive Bell’s essays on aestheticism,), literary and art criticism, and of course, writing. Forster wrote such novels as A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howards End, and the posthumously published Maurice (see last post).

Now, on to the stories. I despise most current short stories. These, however, are beautifully written stories that pull you in and keep you there until you finish reading. Forster is a brilliant short story writer, not just in choice of language, but in choice of topic as well. He is writing very much from the heart, which you can tell if you know anything about Forster’s life and other works. His stories tend to take the characters far away, whether to a real place or not. In “The Celestial Omnibus,” the little boy is taken to a heavenly land where literary figures are as alive as the boy. In “The Other Side of the Hedge,” two complete fantasy lands are created, one on each side of the hedge. Another story is set in Greece, another in Italy. Forster writes about the places he loves, both the real ones and the ones inside his imagination.

What’s really beautiful about the collection is that Forster’s stories all come with a moral, and the moral of each is essentially the same: imagination, with all that it entails is the savior of the soul, if not the body. Forster brings romance, literature, travel, and other worlds to the reader to get his point across. At the same time, the stories have real characters, ones that live in the real world (with the exception of “The Other Side of the Hedge,” in which the character is in made-up world,) that deal with real problems. At the end, imagination and everything that goes along with it are the things that can make or break a person. As long as you let yourself believe, you fall into the story and see the beauty and the magic that Forster is describing.

It’s a strange experience to read something that deviates so far from realism, but makes such perfect sense. The reader has to have a vivid imagination and a healthy soul to really understand and appreciate the stories. If the reader is lacking these things, he or she may as well not touch the collection. If the reader thinks him or herself properly equipped, this might be their new favorite short story collection.