The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories, E.M. Forster's 1911 collection, sends polite Edwardians through a hedge, up a hillside, and onto a bus to heaven.

The title story belongs to a boy in a dull London suburb who notices a signpost pointing up a blind alley, marked as the way to Heaven. He follows it, and a horse-drawn omnibus carries him over a rainbow to a country where the people out of books are real and waiting. When he brings a grown-up along, a neighbor who prides himself on his bookshelves, the trip goes very differently for each of them.

The other stories keep the same shape: an ordinary English life brushes against something older than good manners. A picnic party in the hills above an Italian village is scattered by a sudden, nameless fear, and a sullen boy comes back changed. A traveler worn out by the long dusty road of getting ahead pushes through a thorn hedge and finds a green country where nobody hurries. A curate meets a faun on the Wiltshire downs and keeps the secret for life. An old man in Greece finds a spring running through a hollow plane tree, decides he will never leave it, and is lifted onto a mule and carried off against his will.

These are early Forster fantasies, part Greek myth and part social comedy, most of them written before the novels that made his name, Howards End and A Room with a View. Readers of Saki, of the stranger chapters in The Wind in the Willows, or of Forster's own novels will know the mood: sharp about the English, tender toward anyone who steps off the path.

Elizabeth Grace reads it all at one low, level pitch. The rainbow bridge, the Italian hillside, and the hedge with the green country behind it are soft places to let go and drift off.