Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36313 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
What did happen to Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves? This tantalizing question provides the intense drama of racial tension at the centre of Forster's last and greatest novel. After a mysterious incident during their visit to the caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a naive young Englishwoman new to India. As he is brought to trial, the fragile structure of Anglo-Indian relations collapses and the racism inherent in colonialism is exposed in all its ugliness - a theme which still has powerful, dangerous realities today.

Customer Reviews

Heavy going
While the themes of this novel (largely racism and prejudice) are, sadly, apparently timeless, I didn't feel this novel had aged particularly well. The narrative style is definitely `of its age' which, for a modern reader, might be too slow and objective - too divorced from its content, making what should be a heart-rending, heart-stopping story just a bit of a drag. I don't feel this is an inevitable result of the age of the novel. Other classics - many much older, such as Dickens or Austen - retain an immediacy and a humanity across the decades, even centuries. But A Passage to India is - in style - much as it is in content: a study of a stuffier time.

East and West Can Never Meet?
Almost a century after the book's publication the most crucial problems it discussed are as current as they were during Forster's life. The impossibility of communicating across the divide of culture, religion, and race, seems to be even more alive then when he saw it. The value of the novel lies not so much in representing it but in the fact that Forster offers a way out - personal contact. There is little chance people will suddenly like Muslims, Pakistanis, gays, lesbians, Moroccans, Turkish, Kurds etc etc - there is a chance (a very slim chance, Forster would be quick to add) that an American and a Muslim, a Turk and a Kurd, an Israeli and a Palestinian can be friends. The world may not want it, the people that surround them may not want it but the results depend on us alone. If we do not try we only have ourselves to blame.

Passage to India
E.M Forster's classic novel is a savage critique of English colonial attitudes towards the Indian 'subject race' during the British Raj. Having then visited India with his friend Syed Masood - whom this book's principle character is said to be loosely based on - Forster was well-equipped to expose the hypocrasy and racism of Anglo-India.

Tautly written and witheringly sardonic, few characters survive unscathed in this grimly pessimistic portrait of the times. So much so that it is a rather dispiriting read in 2007, when we no longer need Forster's acerbic wit to enlighten us on the arrogance and cruelty of the Empire. Sadly this makes it a rather contemporaneous, even dated read; arguably more interesting as social history than as a novel. This is partly because the characterisations are largely unsympathetic, even the young Indian doctor Aziz, who comes across as overly garrulous and emotional.

In fact, the subtext of the friendship between Aziz and the English schoolmaster Fielding gradually overrides 'the Marabar case' that is central to the novel. Fielding - the only voice of reason and dissent among the British ex-pat community - probably best represents the authorial perspective, but is a rather sketchily drawn character. More a plot device than a real human being, his relationship with Aziz seems to mirror that of Forster and Masood's, suffering many peaks, troughs and changes of heart. In 2007, the homosexual undertones read much more explicitly, no doubt, than they could be at the time of the book's publication.

Nevertheless, the fluctuations of their friendship also embody the uneasy bedfellows of 'emotional' India and the reserve and rationality of the British, and whether they can ever truly connect. 'Not yet', says Aziz in the final paragraph. Even the fictional setting of the novel, Chandrapore, is described in such a derogatory way that the novel makes a stifling, claustrophobic read - like the Marabar caves themselves. Clearly an important work of and about its time, and written with the cutting precision of a master craftsman, but somehow a little obsolete today.