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Those who do not love "slowness," those who want books where something happens at every line, would probably do better to avoid Edward Morgan Forster. Who, by the way, is currently my favorite writer. E.M. Forster, outside of his brief and extraordinary career as a novelist, among other things, wrote (in collaboration with Eric Crozier) the libretto for Billy Budd, one of Benjamin Britten's greatest operatic masterpieces. Both artists, in their respective fields, occupy a "limbic" dimension: they were neither entirely romantic nor entirely modernist, somehow they manage to take the best from both spheres; in Forster's novels as well as Britten's works, thematic leitmotifs continuously resurface, tackled from different perspectives and situations. Both are great intellectuals, weavers of expanded plots, where the context is as much a protagonist as the characters themselves, both capable of conveying genuine, authentic, and powerful empathy and emotional participation in emotional peaks placed at the right points, with absolute mastery and sense of balance. Stumbling upon Britten and Forster has been one of the best things that has happened to me in the recent period of my life.
And now let's delve into the matter at hand, namely A Passage to India, his last novel, published in 1924. E.M. Forster would die almost fifty years later, but we'll return to that later. To Forster's four "aces," it is quite easy to match the respective suit: A Room with a View-flowers, Howards End-paintings, Maurice-hearts, and, of course, A Passage to India-spades. Spades because the dynamics of the novel essentially revolve around a conflict: the dominating British Empire against the dominated India, which is in turn fragmented and divided (on this, Forster places particular emphasis on the religious aspect). Inserted in such a context, the typical Forsterian conflicts (convention and common morality vs. instinct and emotion, relationships and non-relationships between social classes) gain further complexity, but perhaps also more prominence and immediacy.
Exquisitely elegant prose, capable of rendering even the most "banal" scenes somewhat visionary and symbolic, enhanced by a streak of irony that often emerges, A Passage to India also offers poetic insights of notable lyricism, especially in the descriptions of landscapes, which inevitably interact with the characters' moods: for example, admired from afar, the fateful Marabar Hills appear to Cyril Fielding as peaks of otherworldly beauty, compared to Valhalla and Montsalvat (exquisite Wagnerian citations), when he already knows they are nothing more than a "trap," an illusion that has already completely altered the dynamics of the story. The succession of seasons (cool season, hot season, rainy season) constitutes another very important structural element, dictating the timing of the story and strongly influencing the actions and thoughts of the protagonists.
Aziz, the main Indian character, stands out particularly for his complexity and verisimilitude: he is a man depicted with extreme completeness, with his dynamism, charm, generosity, and sometimes clumsy enthusiasm, but also his ingrained prejudices and excessive stubbornness. And after all, there are no "heroes" in any of Forster's novels, only individuals who, with their own limits, manage to rise from mediocrity and social conventions. And all that is most "beautiful," pure, and spontaneous in A Passage to India arises from the dynamics between individual characters: communion of souls like the nighttime meeting in the mosque between Aziz and Mrs. Moore (an elderly female figure who, like Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End, will assume a strangely symbolic and "mystical" dimension as the story unfolds) and the friendship between Aziz and Professor Fielding, which does not entirely end even with the bitter but sincere "closure" on the last page. Another example is Adela's formation, from a naive girl to a woman capable of introspection, independent thought, and making her own decisions, even at the cost of alienating her "caste." Group dynamics are instead, inevitably, pack dynamics, even if not in a universally negative sense; it is the unjust trial of Aziz, after all, that unites the Indians in a common cause, but most of the time, they result in prejudices, racism, hypocrisies, and pettiness from both sides.
Among the highest emotional peaks of Forster's repertoire come to mind the final, triumphant chapters of Maurice and the sweet reunion between Helen and Margaret at the end of Howards End; here there is no real counterpart, A Passage to India is structured in a more fluid manner, in a complex play of chiaroscuros between illusion and reality, splendor and squalor but, although characterized by a strong symbolic meaning, it remains an entirely plausible story, and "embodied" masterfully. "Retiring" after this masterpiece was undoubtedly a sensible decision on the part of E.M. Forster, albeit undoubtedly frustrating from the point of view of a reader and devotee, but the motivation declared by the writer himself is particularly surprising; many years later: Forster indeed states that the "world" in which he had set his stories was inexorably disappearing, and he could not keep up with the increasingly rapid social changes. Given the underlying modernity of his novels, especially Maurice and A Passage to India, I find it almost amusing.
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