The White Monkey is the fourth of the nine novels in The Forsyte Chronicles. In this new chapter, Fleur and Michael Mont begin to question their marriage when their good friend, author Wilfred Desert, can no longer contain his passion for Fleur. Fleur finds herself torn between her love for Michael and passion for Wilfred.
Meanwhile, Soames Forsyte, as a director of the Providential Premium Reassurance Society, must root out the rumored indiscretions of a manager’s dubious dealings with the Germans. The whole while, he is haunted by a painting of a white monkey with rinds of crushed fruit flung about it and eyes searching for something more.
Often incorrectly called The Forsyte Saga, the nine-novel sequence properly known as The Forsyte Chronicles contains three trilogies of which the first trilogy is The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property - In Chancery - To Let). The second trilogy, A Modern Comedy (The White Monkey - The Silver Spoon - Swan Song) is followed by the third and concluding trilogy, End of the Chapter (Maid in Waiting - Flowering Wilderness - One More River).
A social satire of epic proportions and one that does not suffer by comparison with Thackeray's Vanity Fair...the whole comedy of manners, convincing both in its fidelity to life and as a work of art.
John Galsworthy (1867-1933), English novelist and playwright, went to Oxford to study law but turned to literature after he met Joseph Conrad on a voyage. The Man of Property (1906), the first of the Forsyte Chronicles, established his reputation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
