A Passage to India

Harvest Books, December 1984. Paper Back. Very Good. As a traditional English novel of manners, <i>A Passage to India</i> explores a continent by way of the conflicting cultures that inhabit it. India, in Forster's final story, becomes a character itself, capable of relating to and abandoning men with the same ambivalence with which they relate to and abandon each other. One might, if one was intent on pushing extremes, even say the book is chiefly about friendship, or at least humanity's compulsion for connection. Forester masterfully conveys a vivid sense of colonial Britain (shortly after the turn of the twentieth century) and the volatile tensions that kept Britains and Indians continually at odds. Misunderstandings of culture abound. Nuances are missed by both sides, to disastrous effect. When a young Indian doctor is falsely accused of assaulting an Englishwoman in the Marabar Caves, the novel finds its legs and carries itself through its climax and denouement in a beautiful and nuanced way, pausing frequently to allow the characters and the land to speak of what they've heard. An echo seems to rise from the land itself -- a boum that resonates in each soul -- revealing the terror of eternity, the difficulty of true human relation, and the discrepancies between internal and external realities. Interestingly, every passage to, from, or within India involves an inevitable parting. Yet by book's end, one is intuitively assured that even these partings are the groundwork and the promise of a yet deeper connection in the now, but not yet. A clean, solid, gently used copy.