We continue with the next instalment in the series on Nobel laureate authors, some of whom may not stand the test of time.

In terms of sheer volume, it is hard to beat Galsworthy, whose 1932 citation records his ‘distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga‘. It is perhaps unfashionable these days, when most concerns are on immediacy and succinctness of communication, to consider that his extensive domestic saga of the Forstye family, extending over three generations, could be remotely gripping. How wrong you would be! Time and again he skewers with agonising skill the pretentious, the affluent, the vacuous and the vain. Here he is in Chapter 5 of The Man of Property, observing for us, with effortless accuracy, the difference between the vital and natural Irene, and her almost reptilian husband, Soames: 

‘Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners; impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He would not have gone without a bath for worlds – it was the fashion to take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!

‘But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.‘