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Nearly a century after E.M. Forster delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College in 1927, this slim volume remains one of the stranger classics in its field: a work of literary criticism written by an active novelist who insists he is not a scholar, aimed at an audience for whom the academic study of English was itself a novelty. That peculiar origin shapes everything about it. Cambridge had only established its English department eight years earlier, and Forster, lecturing to an audience more accustomed to classics and history, clearly felt free to be conversational, digressive and occasionally mischievous in a way that a later generation of professional critics would not permit themselves.

The framework is deliberately loose. Forster defines the novel as any fictitious prose work of more than 50,000 words and then identifies seven "aspects" he thinks worth examining: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm. He rejects chronology outright, asking us to picture every novelist of the past two centuries writing simultaneously in a single enormous room. It is a charming conceit, and it gives him licence to put Richardson beside James and Sterne beside Woolf without apology. The cost is obvious. You lose any sense of how the form actually evolved, how writers read and argued with one another across generations. The book wants to talk about novels as objects hanging in a timeless space, and that suits a lecturer more than it suits a historian.

The distinctions he coins are the reason the book has survived. The separation of story from plot - "the king died, and then the queen died" against "the king died, and then the queen died of grief" - is the kind of formulation that lodges in your memory on first reading and never leaves. The flat-versus-round character dichotomy has travelled even further, becoming workshop shorthand wherever fiction is taught. Both ideas are tidier than the reality they describe, and later critics have poked holes in them with some justice, but their usefulness as starting points has never really been surpassed.

Forster is weakest where he is most dismissive. His treatment of Henry James is grudging, his reading of Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs almost wilfully unsympathetic, and his brief handling of love and sex in fiction is so determinedly dry it reads as evasion. The later chapters on prophecy, pattern and rhythm grow progressively more impressionistic, and the musical analogies he reaches for feel more suggestive than analytically robust. There is also an unavoidable suspicion, given how little fiction he published after this point, that the book is partly a working novelist talking himself into a corner.

What carries it through these limitations is voice. Forster writes with a plainspoken wit that refuses to intimidate, admitting uncertainty where other critics would bluff. He is interested in what makes novels pleasurable as well as what makes them work, and that generosity of attention is rarer in criticism than it ought to be. As a system it is flawed; as a companion to a life of reading, it remains one of the finest things of its kind.