Book Review 048 / A Passage to India by E M Forster

A Passage to India 

E M Forster 

1924

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 48 / A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)

Octubre 1, 2015 

The narrative point of view in A Passage to India is elusive. At points, particularly when describing (supposedly) neutral scenes such as landscape, Forster uses a traditional, omniscient narrative voice. The landscape (or similar) is not however simply described – the description includes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle – see below) judgments and observations. We are being shown India through the eyes of a distinct person or character, albeit one that doesn’t appear in the novel. Would it be safe to assume this point of view is as close to Forster’s as makes no difference?

Julian Barnes: I was wrong about EM Forster

Put off by A Passage to India in his teens, the author has rediscovered a wry, sly and subversive writer

The 100 best novels / No 48 / A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)

Julian Barnes
Friday 2 December 2016

I

f reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self. Occasionally I will reread a book in exactly the same copy as I first did decades previously: and there, in, say, a student text of a Flaubert novel, I will find all those annotations which now, initially, embarrass. Key passages underlined, exclamations in the margin of “Irony!” or “Metaphor!” or “Repeated image!” and so on. And yet often, naive and excited as they seem, these comments are pretty much ones I might be making – if not so explicitly – several decades on. That younger reader wasn’t wrong: it was ironic, it was metaphorical, it was a repeated image. I don’t think you are a more intelligent reader at 65 than at 25; just a more subtle one, and better able to make comparisons with other books and other writers.

Sometimes you change your mind about a writer. Perhaps, when you first read them you were only pretending to admire what you’d been told to admire. But also your tastes change. For instance, at 25 I was more open to writers telling me how to live and how to think; by 65 I had come to dislike didacticism. I don’t want to be told how to think and how to live by, say, Bernard Shaw, or D H Lawrence or the later Tolstoy. I don’t like art – especially theatrical art – whose function seems to be to reassure us that we are on the right side. Sitting there complacently agreeing with a playwright that war is bad, that capitalism is bad, that bad people are bad. “You don’t make art out of good intentions,” is one of Flaubert’s wiser pronouncements.

Maurice review – Merchant Ivory’s EM Forster adaptation richer than ever

5/5stars5 out of 5 stars.

    

Hugh Grant and James Wilby star in this intensely poignant story of two young men forced to deny their love

Peter Bradshaw
Thu 26 Jul 2018

 A revelation … James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice. Photograph: Allstar/Merchant Ivory Productions

E

M Forster’s novel Maurice, unpublished in his own lifetime, often gets treated as an outlier in his work, and maybe the superlative 1987 film version, starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby, was first thought of as an outlier in the prestigious Merchant Ivory canon. This film was clearly capitalising on the 80s Varsity chic of Chariots of Fire and the TV Brideshead Revisited, but it is darker, less picturesque, more claustrophobically and even tragically male (though Judy Parfitt and Helena Bonham Carter do what they can with cameo roles). Now, Maurice, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, who collaborated with Kit Hesketh-Harvey on the screenplay, is being rereleased as part of the Flare strand, showcasing LGBT-themed films, at London’s BFI Southbank and in cinemas nationwide.

Howards End by EM Forster / Review

Howards End by EM Forster

Digested classics / Howards End by EM Forster

TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2011

Well, it is odd and sad that our minds should be such seed-beds, and we without power to choose the seed. But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul. Margaret and Helen have been more patient, and it is suggested that Margaret has succeeded--so far as success is yet possible. She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth. Whether Helen has succeeded, one cannot say. 

Howards End is about two families. The Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret, are intellectuals, deeply interested in what they call "personal relations," and the life of the mind. The Wilcoxes, who own the titular country house, are pragmatic and businesslike, care little for "personal relations," and only value what is useful to them. If one of these sounds preferable to you, it sounds also preferable to me, and when I tell you that this novel is about the essential struggle between these two perspectives perhaps you will understand why I do not think Howards End is quite successful. 

In short: Margaret Schlegel befriends the Wilcox matron, Ruth, who promptly dies and leaves Margaret Howards End, though it is written in a note to the remaining Wilcoxes who proceed to ignore it. Margaret then befriends the widower (and much older) Henry Wilcox, who, surprisingly, asks Margaret to marry him. Margaret, surprisingly, accepts. (Observant readers may note that this puts her on the path to inherit Howards End anyway, which is the only way the book could end, really.) The engagement is not conflict-free, and Howards End represents the stakes is in this allegorical battle: England, the world, the future, etc. In this passage Forster rhapsodizes over a hilltop view of the English countryside and coast:

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

Though it sports some nice prose, I am ambivalent about this passage. It very tidily expresses the novel's entire theme, but to do so Forster, as he frequently does, stamps all over the book, showing his footprints. Was he this intrusive in A Room with a View?

The larger problem, for me, is that I simply don't buy the central plot point of the book's second half, that Margaret would accept Wilcox' proposal. Wilcox is a lout, dismissive to Margaret, disdaining of servants and the poor, valuing only what he can use or buy and throwing the rest on the mind's rubbish-heap. Margaret keeps insisting on his fundamental goodness, but I fail to see it. Forster's own opinion seems to be that the Wilcoxes are worthwhile because, as one character puts it, "They keep England going, it is my opinion." (I suppose Forster wrote too early to know how Mussolini was respected for making the trains run on time.)

But through a convoluted series of happenings, Wilcox is redeemed and all is set right. His redemption fails to redeem Margaret's poor judgment in marrying him, which in turn undermines Forster's regard for her sense of "personal relations." Thinkers and doers are reconciled, and you yourself may guess where they spend the rest of their happy days.

FIFTY BOOKS PROJECT

The 100 best novels / No 48 / A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 48

 A Passage to India 

by EM Forster 

(1924)

EM Forster's most successful work is eerily prescient on the subject of empire

Robert McCrum

Monday 18 August 2014

I

n 1957, EM Forster, looking back in old age, wrote that the late-empire world of A Passage to India "no longer exists, either politically or socially". Today, approaching 100 years after its composition, the novel is probably as "dated" as ever. Yet – because Forster's concern is the forging of a relationship between a British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor, reflecting the larger tragedy of imperialism – A Passage to India stands as a strangely timeless achievement, one of the great novels of the 20th century.

The part of A Passage to India that most readers remember, of course, is the tortuous romantic drama of the Marabar caves. Thus: when Adela Quested, an English schoolteacher, and her companion Mrs Moore arrive in Chandrapore they enter colonial India, a place obsessed with the promotion of British values and the British way of life. The idea is that Adela will meet and marry Mrs Moore's son Ronny, an eligible but bigoted British civil servant, the city's magistrate. But Miss Quested, as her name implies, has other ideas. Rejecting the prejudice and insularity of the British community, she sets out to investigate the "real" India, assisted in her search by Dr Aziz, a young Muslim doctor who naively wants to promote an entente between the master race and its colonial subjects. Each, in turn, is encouraged by the head of a local government college.Aziz arranges for Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to visit the famous caves at Marabar. There, in a classic episode of Forsterian "muddle", something happens between Aziz and Adela that disgraces the doctor, and inflames the furious hostility of the British sahibs. In the crisis, Aziz, already disdained as "spoilt westernised", is imprisoned. Eventually, after a trial, Adela withdraws her charges and Aziz, radicalised and angry, moves to the native state of Forster's imagination. "I am an Indian at last," he says, and he stands alone in the monsoon rain. There, in the closing part of the novel, he is visited by Fielding, the British schoolteacher who had been his great confidant and friend. The Aziz-Fielding relationship tormented Forster. In a passage that caused him great creative agony, he wrestled with the complexity of an east-west understanding. "But the horses didn't want it – they swerved apart; the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion… they didn't want it. 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'" It is a bleak but prescient conclusion: the issue of east and west is no nearer a resolution today than it was 100 years ago.

A note on the text

EM Forster visited the caves of Barabar in January 1913 on his first visit to India. It was an experience he never forgot, and it was into his fictional caves of "Marabar" that he sent Mrs Moore and her young companion, Adela, in the central and all-important section of his masterpiece, Part II, Caves. On his return from India, he began to write an Indian novel, but abandoned it to write Maurice, a novel of homosexual desire that would not be published until after his death. He did not return to his "Indian" manuscript until 1921, having recently accepted a post as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Nevertheless, the experience of writing the novel was hardly fulfilling to him. He admitted privately that he was "bored by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form", especially "the studied ignorance of the novelist". The last section, Temple, was Forster's attempt, after a long struggle, to lift the narrative to a higher plane, as well as to resolve the unbridgeable conflict within the Raj.

A Passage to India was published on 4 June 1924 by the British imprint Edward Arnold, and then on 14 August in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Co. Forster borrowed his title from a Walt Whitman poem of the same name in Leaves of Grass. By the end of the year, there were 17,000 copies in print in Britain and more than 54,000 in the US. Forster's best-ever sales were matched by enthusiastic reviews. Only in India were critics exercised by his portrait of Anglo-Indian society. Today, he is seen as eerily prescient.

The typescript of A Passage to India, with many manuscript revisions, is now held in the library at King's College, Cambridge, Forster's home throughout his later years. As many have noted, Forster never wrote another novel, and lived until 1970, aged 91. For 46 years, his reputation grew with every book he didn't write. Maurice (written 1913-14), an explicitly homosexual novel, was published posthumously in 1971.

Three more from EM Forster

A Room With a View (1908); The Longest Journey (1907); Howards End (1910).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

Digested classics / Howards End by EM Forster

DIGESTED CLASSICS

Howards End by EM Forster

John Crace
Sat 31 May 2008

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.

Dearest Meg, I am having a glorious time at Howards End. I especially like young Mr Wilcox. We are to be wed.

"You Schlegel sisters are quite the dark horses," said Mrs Munt. "It is surely because you are German."

"Don't be silly, Aunt Juley," Margaret replied. "We are the very best sort of cultured Germans."

It's all over. The Wilcoxes are mercantile; Paul is leaving the book to go to Nigeria - H

"I don't know what came over me," Helen sighed. "We'll hear no more about it," Margaret exclaimed. "Let's go to the Beethoven concert."

We are not concerned with the poor. No one is. But let's imagine someone on the edge of gentility and call him Leonard Bast. See Mr Bast pointlessly trying to improve himself by attending the same concert as the Schlegels. See Helen pick up Mr Bast's umbrella in error. See Mr Bast follow her home.

"I believe you took my umbrella," Mr Bast insisted, for he is of sufficient impoverishment not to be able to afford the loss. "I'm always stealing umbrellas," Helen announced with Bohemian breeziness.

Love, property and propriety ... Sam West and Helena Bonham-Carter in Howards End.

"And you, Mr Bast, are a fascinating specimen of the lower orders," Margaret said. "Allow me to patronise you for the rest of the book."

Taking her card, Mr Bast returned to his squalid lodgings.

"Gawd bless you, Leonard," said Jacky, the least convincing temptress in English fiction. "Come to bed."

Margaret twitched with social embarrassment. The Wilcoxes were moving in across the road.

Dear Miss Schlegel. We are in London because my son Charles is to be wed. Paul is in Africa so we can meet - Yours, Mrs Wilcox.

"How I miss Howards End," Mrs Wilcox said wanly.

"I too have my doubts about Modernity," Margaret smiled.

The funeral was over. Edwardian women understood their obligation to die with little fuss. "She was a good woman," Mr Wilcox intoned gravely. "There's just one thing. She wanted Miss Schlegel to have Howards End. It's most improper."

Two years had passed when there was a knock on the Schlegels' door.

"Where's my 'usband?" Jacky demanded.

"What are you talking about?" Margaret responded.

The next day an ashen-faced Mr Bast stood before Margaret. "My wife found your card and reached an unfortunate conclusion," he said. "I was walking alone for 24 hours to be with Nature."

"I too love Nature, Fate and other ideals that start with Capital Letters," Margaret condescended.

"I'm a clerk with Porphyrion Insurance . . ."

"We'll have to do something about that."

Margaret had worries of her own. Progress was marching onwards and their home was to be demolished. Where would they live? Just then she espied Mr Wilcox.

"Good day," she said. "I am very concerned about my friend, Mr Bast. And I am shortly to be homeless."

"I have heard Porphyrion will smash and I have a house you may rent," Mr Wilcox replied gruffly.

Margaret's heart skipped. Could it be that Mr Wilcox would propose? "Would you do me the honour of marrying me?" asked Mr Wilcox. She hesitated for a decorous few days before giving an affirmative response. "May we live at Howards End?"

"It's too shabby and London is growing so fast it's almost suburban," he said testily. "I have rented a Shropshire estate."

The day of the engagement party did not start well. Charles, disturbed by his father marrying a German, symbolically ran over a cat. Then Helen appeared with Mr and Mrs Bast.

"Porphyrion didn't smash," Helen sobbed, "but Mr Bast left his employment anyway. Now he's penniless."

"Dearest Mr Wilcox," Margaret pleaded. "Please find work for our pet who has fallen on hard times because of us."

"A man's future is in his own hands," he answered swiftly, speaking for Capital.

"Hello again ducky," Mrs Bast slurred.

Mr Wilcox blanched. "I release you from your vows, Miss Schlegel," he murmured gravely. "My youthful dalliance has been exposed."

Margaret's heart was reeling but her head was German. "I forgive you," she said eventually.

So Margaret settled for Love, Property and Propriety. All that spoiled her happiness was Helen. "She is avoiding me," she wept sagely. "We must interrupt our self-satisfaction to trick Helen into meeting us."

"I'm with child," declared Helen. "Mr Bast is the father. I took pity and awarded him charity intercourse."

"Charles must beat the bounder to within an inch of his life," Mr Wilcox shouted.

Leonard Bast lay dead. His heart had given out spontaneously.

"See how everything is connected," Margaret wittered. "You, Me, Helen, Her Baby, Nature, Town, Love and Fate. Even Mr Bast. Let's all be unbearably smug until the first world war starts."

THE GUARDIAN

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Possession by AS Byatt

Crash by JG Ballard

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Claudine in Paris by Colette

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Brideshead Revisited by EvelynWaugh 

Howards End by EM Forster

Mrs Dallaway by Virginia Woolf