E. M. Forster (1879–1970)

Slighter than Forster's later work, this still-engaging story covers similar ground. It investigates how the social mores of turn-of-century England ran contrary to the exchange of human emotions and equality among classes. Lucy is a young lady being chaperoned on a trip through Italy. She chafes against the oversight when romance blooms between herself and a young man from her country. Back home, she's confronted with falling back on her own resources to figure out the morality of her show more feelings. The plot thickens when she becomes engaged to another man.

The finest accomplishment here is Forster's accurate capturing of the feeling of being engaged to the wrong person. Lucy reads her unease as a personal failing, something she needs to correct in herself. Any longing she feels for an escape, an alternative, she also rationalizes away. Pressure to marry the right person in the eyes of others clashes with personal desire, and her struggle exhibits all the inner turmoil of a real person in this situation. The only portion I doubted was her final decisiveness, but in this George acts as her catalyst, arranging her thoughts for her. Which is a bit ironic when you think about what she says to Cecil, but then I suppose they really were her thoughts, they were just in a muddle.

Mr. Emerson's chapter towards the end ought to be framed in a gallery of Greatest Discourses on Love of All Time. show less

Somehow I'd gotten the impression that A Passage to India was a departure from Forster's earlier novels. In subject matter, sure, but in all else this is a very Forsterian novel: sharply observed social commentary, lyrical prose, meditations on the human condition, and an almost mythic quality that is nevertheless grounded in the banal. Forster's novels are romantic, but they don't romanticize.

I'm glad I found myself reading this book in 2020. It's fundamentally a novel about nationalism, a show more topic I have formed Strong Opinions about. Actually maybe just one opinion, which Forster evidently shares. Please imagine, in place of this book, a tract titled "NATIONALISM" in 72-pt font, followed by one sentence: "FUCK THAT SHIT." (Forster phrases it more delicately.)

As a portrait of India and Indian people goes, I am not equipped to judge this novel. I think I can say it is a humane and openhearted effort. Certainly Forster's disdain for British culture does not lead him into the trap I expected, that of romanticizing the East. Instead, he attempts to be both empathetic and objective.

As far as objectivity goes, well. The text is littered with generalizations about Indians; some of these are the narrative's attempts at pointing out cultural differences, while others rise from the collective point-of-view of the colonizers. All that said, I expected this to be a novel written for the white gaze, and it's not quite that. Forster seems to be reaching toward an inclusive audience, whether or not he ever quite gets there.

I won't give away the plot, but I will say that this novel is set in British India at the turn of the 20th century and shows a British elite closing ranks in response to their tribal identity being threatened. The threat isn't some vast cultural divide between British and Indian people—the mutiny of 1857 is passing out of memory; the Indian elite is increasingly Westernized. To borrow an observation from Hannah Arendt, it's not necessarily difference that triggers xenophobia, but assimilation and the threat of social categories dissolving.

Meanwhile we have Dr. Aziz and his circle, acculturated Muslim Indians who are trying to invent a tribe of their own. Their definition of India keeps widening—Muslim identity becomes Indian pan-nationalism, which almost widens to human solidarity—but they, and we, can't quite reach across the gap.

And here's where this book gets really interesting, using the vocabulary of religion to imagine the (im)possibilities of a truly universal love. You could, in fact, write a very trite five-paragraph essay about how the second half of this book follows the structure of the Nativity story. I have no idea if Forster had this in mind; certainly he's not crass enough to explicitly compare the experiences Adele and Mrs. Morse have in the caves to an Annunciation. Nevertheless, this scene does take on a numinous quality. Encountering divinity is not a comfortable experience, threatening our belief that we are separate individuals in a structured universe. When the gods try to seize us, we flail.

This book won't enchant you with its memorable character studies or gripping plot, but something about the shape of Forster's novels is really compelling to me. I'm glad I read this one. show less

‘The past! the infinite greatness of the past!’ thrilled Walt Whitman in ‘A Passage to India’. A quarter of a century later, Forster borrowed Whitman's title, but with a very different mood in mind. In place of the American's wild-eyed certainties, Forster gives us echoes and confusion; instead of epic quests of the soul, there is only an eternal impasse of personal and cultural misunderstanding.

Animals and birds are half-seen, unidentified; the landscape is a featureless blur; show more motives are illogical and rest on miscommunication. All human language, in the final analysis, amounts to nothing more than the dull ou-boum thrown back from the Malabar caves during the fateful expedition at the heart of the novel. ‘If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – “ou-boum”.’

Will Self once recommend as an exercise reducing a novel to a single word (he suggested in the case of The Naked Lunch, for instance, that it would be ‘insect’). For A Passage to India, that keyword would be ‘muddle’ – a term that recurs, gradually shedding its cosiness and accreting a sense of existential indistinctness, a kind of cosmic flou that renders good intentions, indeed all human endeavour, futile. ‘I like mysteries,’ says Mrs Moore, the novel's moral core, ‘but I rather dislike muddles.’ Elsewhere, Forster talks with something like dread of a ‘spiritual muddledom’ for which ‘no high-sounding words can be found’.

The plot of this book is, at times, heart-poundingly dramatic, but Forster is careful to make sure that even this is founded on doubt and indecision. In fact, what one thinks of as ‘the plot’ of A Passage to India is a storyline that arises, reaches its climax, and is resolved entirely within the second of the book's three acts. What then, you might ask, is the point of parts one and three? Well, among other things they prevent the plot from seeming too tidy – there is always something before the beginning, something after the end, to frustrate neat conclusions. ‘Adventures do occur,’ he says, ‘but not punctually.’ Life isn't tidy – it's a muddle.

British India is a perfect setting for this kind of exploration: not only does it play host to numerous individual confusions, it is itself, as it were, the political embodiment of such a confusion. One of the wonderful things about this book is that the obvious hypocrisy and conflict between the English and the Indians is not left to stand alone, as a heavy-handed message, but is echoed by similar divisions between Muslim and Hindu, man and woman, young and old, devotee and atheist. Still, it is the gulf of understanding between the British rulers and their Indian subjects that provides the most interesting material for Forster's bitter social comedy. Most of the Brits are deliciously dislikable, couching their racism in patriotic slogans, droning through the national anthem every evening at the Club, and – like one of the wives – learning only enough of the language to speak to the servants (‘so she knew none of the politer forms, and of the verbs only the imperative mood’).

The heroes of this book are those that try to reach across this divide, or to challenge the assumptions of their own side.

‘Your sentiments are those of a god,’ she said quietly, but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.

Trying to recover his temper, he said, ‘India likes gods.’

‘And Englishmen like posing as gods.’

These attempts don't work, and the reason they don't work is that cultural or racial divides are – the book suggests – only a special case of that ‘spiritual muddledom’ that is a universal constant. Still, the worldview isn't as bleak as it might seem. That famous ‘not yet’ in the book's closing lines is a lot more hopeful than a ‘no’, and if we're prevented from coming together by our tangled and violent past, that also raises the possibility that a better future can be laid down by the present we choose to enact now, every day, with each other. ‘For what is the present, after all,’ as Walt Whitman asked, ‘but a growth out of the past?’ show less

Reading this book I was struck over and over again by EM Forster’s sensitivity, sparsity, and genius. I can’t express how glad I am that this book was published, even after 50 years.

How did Forster create Maurice-- off-handedly arrogant, non-intellectual, misogynistic and insensitive-- and breathe such feeling and particular life into him? Over the course of the book, Maurice becomes variously enflamed and tempered, confuses himself, understands himself, learns and regresses… do I show more dislike him? Do I love him? I feel with him.

Clive swings to the forefront now and again, frustratingly opaque with repression. Alec creeps up from the background— is enough time given to him? Maybe not. In Forster’s “Terminal Note” he writes about expanding Alec’s role in his rewrites, and reading the letter in Chapter 42 I got a breathtaking sense of the unexplored depth of Alec's perspective, and I wonder how the book would read if he had been expanded even more. But I’m satisfied. Besides, the end of the book feels much more like a beginning of Maurice and Alec’s story than a culmination.

In general, of course, I’m in awe of Forster’s writing. I wish I knew how to express what he does so well, the wonder of his under-writing. Maybe if I figure it out I can try to do it too.

P.S. Pronounced "Morris", apparently. show less