Review: A Passage To India

I had to read E. M. Forster's A Passage to India for my British Indian Literature class, and I must say it's phenomenal. Certainly among the best books I've recently read. The language from start to finish is pretty much perfect. Of the sky over Chandrapore, the fictional city of Forster's Indian setting, he writes: "The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint is blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference - orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault. The distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue.
The sky settles everything - not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful. By herself she can do little - only feeble outbursts of flowers. But when the sky chooses, glory can rain into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun, in fused in it daily; size from the prostrate earth. No mountains infringe on the curve. League after league the earth lies flat, heaves a little, is flat again. Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through soil is the endless expanse interrupted. Theses fists and fingers are the Marabar hills, containing the extraordinary caves." This descriptive deluge rides up in swells throughout the text, but is not the text itself. Unlike Hardy, whose descriptive heights carry on their wave-crests the peaks of his personal insights, Forster's human vision mixes well with a more colloquial style and permits him (with seamless transition) to shift from speech to thought to styled scenic depiction. This balance he quite thoroughly achieves, and no small detail disappears in the mixing. The symbolic language he achieves in his descriptive peaks he he recasts in his dialogues and interior-monologues and in all of this I was well pleased. The motives of the book are likewise excellent, a careful exploration of the points of friction in British India. His view refuses to be simple-minded, he carries up the complexities of the Indian factionalism, its unified conflict with the British, and presents a world of types, avatars of types, and complicators of types. His small infinities, twists of depth which permit unravelling and interpretation only so far as the mysteries they mist around, baffle attempts to categorize (and thereby reconquer) the India he presents. His pantheon of characters stress one another along surprising lines, Aziz, Fielding, Godbole and the presiding spirit of Mrs. Moore all mottle together along strange lines which need not fit expectation, follow the desires of the optimistic (or sadistic) reader, or mark anything other than an entirely real but intensely symbolic and ideological passage to, through, and from India.