A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

A Passage to India is one of the most interesting books I have read. It takes place in colonial India, and what fascinated me about the book was how Forster mingles different perspectives. There is not really one central character - instead the story centers on several whose lives and paths converge and diverge around a single event, a trip to the Marabar Caves, which happens about halfway through the book. There is Miss Quested, who has recently come from England to India for the purpose of feeling out the possibility of marriage to Ronnie, a British official. There is her travel companion, Ronnie's mother, Mrs. Moore. There is Mr. Fielding, a schoolteacher who has made more of an effort to comingle with the Indian natives than most of his fellow countrymen. And there is Dr. Aziz, a young Muslim physician, whose idea it is to take Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore to the Marabar Caves.

It is the incident at the caves that drives the story, both before and after, but the book is a character study more than anything. What makes it such an interesting character story is the ambiguity. No one is particularly likable, nor unlikable for that matter.* Nor is it really easy to entirely understand the characters' motivations. In real life, people are complex and confusing and prone to misunderstanding and miscommunication, and Forster brings this complexity into the story, along with the addition of cultural differences.

In fact, it was the cultural differences that really fascinated me. Many characters acted and thought in ways that should not have entirely make sense to me, and yet they were written in such a way that I could understand them even where I could not relate to them. It made me wonder about Forster himself, who as an Englishman could not possibly have written with the perspective of an Indian. Was he particularly astute, or is he simply able to sound particularly astute? Does he really have great insight into the culture he was writing about, or does it just ring true to people like me who are far removed from that culture? There's no way of really knowing, I guess, but it made me think.

Overall, I liked the book. It was not as clear and straightforward as, say, The Great Gatsby, but it was descriptive and complex and interesting. It had slow and beautifully written passages, and fast-paced and engaging passages, and it was a very satisfying read.


*At least among the central characters. Many of the British colonists are quite unlikable, and I think the weakness of the book is that in being sympathetic to the people of India, Forster is sometimes overly unsympathetic to the British. Although I know that this book was, in some ways, an indictment of the British colonial society, it sometimes comes across as too harsh.