In Where Angels Fear to Tread, what I would call the unstellar partner to the unstellar The Longest Journey, Forster against tries to use an accepted realist trope (the international episode: the journey abroad) to explore issues of spirituality beyond mere domestic morality, which this trope is not already prepared to handle. The characters are not believable or compelling, and the journey to save the fallen, entrapped Englishwoman fails to receive any interest from the reader. Comically, it entertains quite as well as his other “traveling” narratives (some of his short stories and A Room with a View), but this fluffy novel can’t sustain the weight of the spiritual issues he wants to explore with it.
The most interesting moment of the book is after the little child produced by the unholy alliance between the English widower and the Italian loafer dies. Forster notes that even though the boy had died, a “vast apparatus” of pity, love, sympathy, and friendship had grown around the death. It is the slight shift Forster needs to move away from the archaic model of the novel following the individual, to a new model in which the growth of interpersonal relations is what truly matters.