A Passage to India by E.M. Forster: Review
Book: A Passage to India. Date of Publication: January 1, 1924. Pages: 362. Genre: Historical Fiction.
For my review of James Joyce’s Dubliners I introduced my “hostage book” category. Hostage books are ones you’d never finish if given the chance to be distracted because they’re slow to get started or kind of boring. But if you don’t have any other options you can come to appreciate them. For this review I’d like to introduce the book report book. These are the books you read for school because they’re masterfully written or culturally significant but you fail to develop any personal connection to.
Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested are two English ladies fresh off the boat in Chandrapore. Mrs. Moore has travelled to visit her son in the civil service and to facilitate his marriage to Miss Quested. Being new to the country they have not yet been indoctrinated to the racial prejudices of the other Anglo-Indians and want to see the “real India”. Mrs. Moore gets just such a chance when she escapes their stuffy country club activities to visit the local mosque. There she meets Dr. Aziz and the two become fast friends. He details the infinite humiliations, big and small, of living under British occupation. From having his carriage requisitioned by the spiteful wives of his superiors to being called to work at exactly such a time as he regularly meets with friends for dinner.
At a party Aziz offers to take the ladies on an excursion to the nearby Marabar caves. These are a natural wonder with mirror-polish walls and a deep mysterious echo. This is only out of politeness and Dr. Aziz is horrified to find that they have missed this subtlety. At great expense to himself he organizes this trip but it all goes terribly wrong when Miss Quested accuses him of assaulting her when they were alone in one of the caves. The fragile status quo in Chandrapore is immediately shattered as the community takes sides along racial lines for his trial.
Now here comes the first one of my book report 5 paragraph essay points. Forster displays a brilliant understanding of human character. From the slippery slope of mob mentality:
He had not gone mad at the phrase “an English girl fresh from England,” he had not rallied to the banner of race. He was still after facts, though the herd had decided on emotion. Nothing enraged Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community. Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated.
[Pg. 183]
To what I can only describe as the most English sequence of events I have ever read. After a tea party organized by Dr. Fielding, the school principal in Chandrapore, Miss Quested perceives that her fiancée Ronny behaves in a manner that exposes some deeper personality flaws. He is arrogant and blustery, repeating talking points about the faults of Indians that are obviously copied from his superiors. In the carriage ride home she says to him “I think we are not going to married after all, dear old boy” and they talk amicably if not extremely awkwardly. Then the carriage is run off the road after hitting an animal and the jolt of adrenaline brings the two closer again in a classic case of the high bridge effect. She then says “Remember what I just said in the carriage? I would like to take it back if we could” and they are once again set on their previous course. Forster puts the mercurial nature of such profound feelings as righteousness and love on full display. The echo of the Marabar caves is also a clear symbol for the reverberations of Miss Quested’s accusation. The initial facts blur as outrage and tribalism take over until all that is left is a dull and oppressive “Bo-oom”.
And consequently the echo flourished, raging up and down like a nerve in the faculty of her hearing, and the noise in the cave, so unimportant intellectually, was prolonged over the surface of her life. She had struck the polished wall — for no reason — and before the comment had died away, he followed her, and the climax was the falling of her field-glasses. The sound had spouted after her when she escaped, and was going on still like a river that gradually floods the plain.
[Pg. 215]
It’s all very good, if a bit clinical. And, like its portrayal of the unknowable mystical Orient, I don’t think I’ll find a need to revisit it in the near future.
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
[Pg. 150]
