Backlisted - A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound. And the reason we've done this the other way round, and we're a bit confused by doing it, aren't we, John?

We are. Because we're old and set in our ways, is that we recorded a show in mid-July at the Byline Festival at Dartington Hall in Devon. And so this episode is a bit different from what we usually do. You'll hear an audience, you'll hear a four-way discussion of the book, and we think it was a really special one, don't we, John? We do. We think it was one of the very best we've ever done, I think.

Because it was, yeah, it best we've ever done I think because it was yeah it's like it's a festival so you have to pull these things together with very little notice and we had a notion that the two guests that we chose to go with would respond to the book that we chose and the book was do you want to I think we can say what the book was well you were about passage to India by E.M. Forster if you think you know all about E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, just listen to the next hour or so of this. Go and say, stay on the line, caller. Also, John and I both had a great weekend at Byline and at Dartington,

and John hosted a lot of events and spoke to a lot of authors, and you can hear us chatting through some of that and talking about the experience of that from his point of view, my point of view, and maybe even from theirs. On the last episode of Locklisted, the podcast, which is available exclusively to the subscribers to our Patreon. our Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com forward slash backlisted and register with us there, you'll be able to hear us talk about not just the Darsling Festival, but also what we've been

reading this week. And what I'd been reading that week was Jay Griffith's new book, Nemesis My Friend, published by Little Toller. A wonderful book, and the subject of actually the discussion I had with Jay at the Bylone Festival. And the book I was reading was Sophie Divery's The Library of Unrequited Love,

which came out about 10 years ago from McElhoes Press. French novel, really, really interesting, funny, short, little book that any book lover would enjoy. So if you want to hear us talk about those, go and find Locklisted via our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Right, I think we should get on with the show. To Devon!

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the Barnes Cinema at Dartington Hall Estate in Devon. Dartington Hall is the place, as some of you might know, where the Labour Party manifesto was written by Michael Young in 1945. And we've been here as the guests of the Byline Festival for a whole weekend of talks, river swims, arguments, and some amazing, amazing events. And we are delighted that we're here today as Backlisted, first live Backlisted that we've done in 2023. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the publisher where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And we're here today to talk about the novel A Passage to India by E.M. Forster.

How many people here in the Barnes Cinema and this wonderful audience have read E.M. Forster's A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. How many people here in the Barnes Cinema and this wonderful audience have read E.M. Forster's A Passage to India? Wow. Everyone. Wow, that's incredible. Well, that's lucky. We don't need to do a plot recap for them. They're across it. We're very, very pleased to be joined on stage today by two guests. First of all, Alice Jolly. Alice is a novelist, playwright and memoirist who has won both the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for short stories and the Penn Ackley Prize for autobiography.

Her novel, Marianne Sate Imbusile, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio in 2019 and in 2021 she was awarded an O. Henry Award her new volume of short stories from far around they saw us burn was published in April and this is her third appearance on an episode of Backlisted she previously joined us for discussions of Shirley Hazard's novel The Great Fire way back in 2016 on our seventh episode and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier in episode 96. Welcome back. Thank you for asking me. Thank you and we're also joined today by the novelist Patrick McCabe. we're also joined today by the novelist Patrick McCabe. Patrick is an author of novels, plays and short stories, who has won numerous awards and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Butcher Boy in 1992 and Breakfast on Pluto in 1998, both of which have been

made into films. His most recent novel, Pog Mahhone, was published in 2022, and his next novel, Golden Grove, is currently funding at Unbound and will be published soon. A well-known online encyclopedia categorises him as follows. Period, contemporary. Genre, black. Subject, contemporary. Genre, black. Subject, Ireland. Literary movement, neo-delusional. Patrick, would you care to comment on that?

I found it hard to locate the neo-delusional section in the bookshop. Delusional, I think, is probably the most accurate from the get-go. And the idea of reaching what it is you set out to achieve has always been, in my case, very delusional. On it goes. Patrick, this is the second occasion on which Patrick has joined us. He was with us to discuss the novel A Goat's Song by Dermot Healy a couple of years ago on episode 140. So please, that's your panel for a discussion of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.

Thank you. Patrick, it was your idea that we read and discuss A Passage to India. When did you first read this novel? Can you remember? Well, I came to the classics the way a lot of boys in the 60s did. There was a series of comic books called classics illustrated and i read pretty much all of those and uh ivan ho you know kidnapped all those things and pretty much bluffed my way through life by pretending i'd read the real thick 600 page versions and nod sagely whenever anything was mentioned but knew enough just to get by.

The Passage to India was one of those. But then recently I got a copy of it and found myself, say, 70 or 80 pages through. This is really hard going, I found. Some of it very kind of torrid. And then somewhere around the 100- page mark, I found myself swimming in this extraordinary world that became curiously familiar to me. And I wasn't quite sure why that was. And then I began to realize that the language between Dr. Aziz and Cyril Fielding, the English teacher, was very similar to relationships that I'd overheard as a boy between, shall we say,

members of the Anglo-Irish gentry and indigenous Irish farm workers, in that there was a great affection between said people, but there was also a subtext that you couldn't name. And I began to kind of get intrigued by the subtle way that Forster was dropping these things in, you know? Nothing overt, everything evasive, but still all the time this sense of abiding affection, but that at any time could come asunder. That the cultural gaps... See, the interesting thing about art is that everybody,

it seems to me in any drama, everybody has their reasons. You know, Cyril Fielden thinks he's doing the right thing. So does Dr Aziz. And that's all very well until things start to go wrong. And then on these, there's a phrase in, I think in Dubliners, where James Joyce, who was a metropolitan himself, talks about crossing the dark mutinous Shannon waves. Like the metropolitan mind has this view that the rural mind is in some way unpredictable, untrustworthy, charming, but that can turn sour.

The mutiny is buried in the language. If you're trained to the language of foster, you begin to see that there are little elliptical clues that all is not as it seems. And then that becomes the great metaphor of the Marabar Caves. But ultimately, what really seduced me about the book was its abandonment, ultimately, of social realism. There's a consistent kind of reference to the vaults of heaven, the stars, the sound of the universe, the pulsing. And after that, I was completely hooked. I think it's one of the greatest novels I've ever read. Great. We will come on to the third section of the novel and discuss some

of the reasons why it may have come out that way. Alice, can I ask you, many of us will have read Forster. I'm sure John can remember when he first read Forster. I know when I can. Can you? Yes, very much so. I read Forster as a teenager and I absolutely loved it. And I loved it so much that I thought, actually, I mustn't read all of these novels, because then, you know, what am I going to be doing the rest of my life? And actually, by

coincidence, before I knew I was going to be doing this, I had taken The Longest Journey down off the shelves, because that's one I've never read. And I was suddenly thinking, actually, what am I hanging around for now? I mean, you know, I'm in my mid 50s, I might not have much, much longer for all we know, you know, I better finish off now all these things that I was saving up. So I think I'm going to be going back to Forster. But yeah, it was as a teenager. And I think it's really fascinating to think about, for me, how our understanding of the book has changed, but also how it has endured. We know it must be a very good novel because it can be revisited by one generation after another and people can continue to find very different things in it.

The things I absolutely did not see as a teenager. As a teenager, nobody was going to be told that Forster was gay and we would barely have understood anything about that. And of course we did know it was a colonial novel, but that was just the British Empire and that was what it was. And it wasn't discussed in a critical way, really. So now reading it, the fact of Forster being gay seems very present. very present and Patrick's already said that you know right at the center of it is this friendship between Aziz and fielding which they both want to be a close friendship but there's so much that divides them and there are cultural

things that divide them and spiritual things that divide them. I mean, the book is often about a clash between rationalism and a more spiritual way of thinking about the world. And Aziz is definitely a more spiritual person fielding more of a rational person and that divides them. But it's deeply moving, I think, at the end of the book when they manage to reconnect in some way. They're never going to have the friendship or relationship they could have had. But it comes to the words of not now, not now. So Forster kind of knew that at, then this friendship will be possible because there will no longer be that domination of one people by another group of people.

But also now I see it very much as Forster looking forward to the time when homosexuality would be legalized, which of course didn't come until much later. But I'm always deeply touched by Forster saying how angry he was with the establishment for the fact that homosexuality was illegal and how much of his time it had wasted and all the subterfuge that had been necessary because of this. And I think i feel that deeply now in the book which i as a teenager would not have felt that i think john i felt

reading this i've read quite a lot of forster i've even read the pageants scripts that he wrote in collaboration with ray form williams but I hadn't read A Passage to India. I'm picking up something you were saying there. I am fascinated with A Passage to India, how not only can it be interpreted and has been interpreted in different ways at different times in the last century, but I feel we'll interpret it differently again in 20-30

years time it feels like a novel literature art in the process of becoming but it's still in the process of becoming 100 years after publication what did you think Mitch? I mean absolutely rereading it has been has been amazing because I it happens all the time, obviously. You read a book when you're a student, and I have to say that my tastes as a student, I was looking for experimental boldness in fiction, and I always thought Forster was a bit of an old fuddy-duddy, and I, you know, goodness me, dear me, the novel tells a story, and all of that kind of sort of slightly annoying Edwardianism. and all of that kind of sort of slightly annoying Edwardianism.

So not only did I read, did I find, I just not remembered huge chunks of the book. We all remember them. We'll come on to the Marrowbar Caves. And I'd remembered them. As you, I don't think I'd really picked up on the kind of the gay aspect of the relationship between Fielding and Aziz. And I suppose I was

reading it in conjunction with at the time you know Edward Said's Orientalism and Lord Jim you know Conrad and Kipling and and that kind of way when you study literature academically you're looking for the themes and you're looking for its social and political context, all of which are important. But going back to read, I remember not really understanding why people bothered with aspects of the novel. It just seemed sort of, you know, flat and round characters. I've underlined more bits of aspects of the novel than any book. Just, it's an incredible book about fiction.

And I suppose because we've spent the last seven years Andy reading a hell of a lot of novels and thinking about them talking about them suddenly feel like Forster's totally back on the team and this novel is a much more interesting book than I expected it to be and when it was I think when you said that Pat that you'd said and I was thinking hang on Pat McC Pat McCabe, Ian Forster. That's interesting. That's worth exploring. And here we are.

Patrick, would you pass me your copy of the book there so I can just read the blurb on the back? Not to myself, out loud. I'm going to ask the panel if they think this blurb on a Penguin Classics edition is a good blurb or a not-so-good blurb. What did happen to Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves? You lost me at the first place. I know, you lost me at the question, yeah.

This tantalising question provides the intense drama at the centre of Forster's last and greatest novel, which explores racial tension in colonial India. After a mysterious incident during their visit to the Marabar Caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a naive young English woman. As he is brought to trial, the fragile structure of Anglo-Indian relations collapses and the racism inherent in colonialism is exposed, a theme which still has powerful, dangerous realities today.

Yet the novel is also, in Forster's words, quote, about something wider than politics, about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky. Panel struck down, ruminating on... How does that sit with you, Patrick? I found, as I was going through the book, striking parallels in the language. I don't want to kind of get too political about it,

but politics is very, very much at the centre of this book. There are casual asides about the nature of the Indian. The Indian does this. The Indian can be expected. And it's all done. It's all voiced in this paternal, pseudo-benign thing. And there's one sentence in it that really alerted me.

That reminded me of a phrase that had actually been used in contemporary times by someone to me who was, shall we say, of a different tribe that would perceive themselves to be, he said, the Catholic is nice, can be good fun to be with, but you can put a tie on him.

Now, women didn't come into it, obviously. You can put a tie on him. You can brush his jacket. But his shoes will never be polished. And that sort of statement is versed in here, and it's always accompanied by a cheery guffaw, as if it was of no consequence. Now, whether the person delivering that knows what

they're doing, or it's a systemic, which I think it is, inheritance, the wound that's incurred by the recipient of that is multifaceted, it's rage, it's unfair, there's an injustice, and that leads inexorably to mutiny. cannot do otherwise and there were little things peppered throughout that but because i was kind of interested in stylistic the entire galactic kind of space within which this drama proceeds i found utterly fascinating and it's what makes it a great novel and makes it burst through the constraints of what we know as social realism. I would like to echo exactly what Patrick said in my reminiscence of how I first read Forster,

which was in the early 90s, there was a book published called The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Kerry, which is about how the modernists and the Bloomsbury Project was fundamentally fuelled by class hatred for the middle classes, the lower classes and the suburban. And it's a catalogue of examples of dreadful snobbery towards people like me, who grew up in Croydon.

Croydon, which always gets a laugh. It's the same as Dartington. It's just in a different place. And I feel myself growing chippy even as I talk about it. Because, Patrick, Carey identifies in Howard's End Forster's ability to both tell the truth as he sees it and be terribly dismissive of entire races and classes of people. I don't know how many of you have read Howard's End, but the character of Leonard Bast,

as John Carey points out, this jumped up little clerk from the suburbs trying to better himself as Forster sees him, should know his place and is killed for his presumption when a bookcase falls on top of him. It could not be a more dramatized example of that guffawing yet pointed thing that you've just talked about, which I, as, you know... Croydon man. Croydon man, took exception to.

Of course you did. But that's the exit strategy in the part of the perpetrator. Oh, yeah, I didn't mean that. You picked it up wrong, so you're doubly indicted. Just banter. Of course. But the Croydon man't mean that. You picked it up wrong, so you're doubly indicted. Just banter. Of course. But the Croydon man will do that. You can put a tie on him.

But not shine his shoes. They don't polish the shoes in Croydon. Oh! Alice, did you have any grievances to air against the own Forster? Not grievances, really, but I am fascinated, and I think this is one of the things I love about Forster, and it's something that I look for in books altogether, is I think a lot of people can make a heavy point in a heavy way.

And also, let's face it, there are a lot of books that are just trivial. But the thing about Forster is he can appear to be really quite trivial. You know, there's a lot of sort of slightly daft social comedy. And, you know, you can see this as a sort of comedy of manners with these English people being slightly ridiculous in India. So there's sort of something likable in a way and kind of funny and quite light about it. And it's not nasty. It's sort of something likable in a way and kind of funny and quite light about it and it's it's not nasty it's sort of just gently poking fun but then below that there's whole oceans of meaning in the book and what's amazing about Forster is that he's never heavy-handed in now now I'm going to tell you the heavy meaning of this. You know, you've got to make it.

The reader is allowed to sort of float along on the surface while knowing there are these huge depths. And that to me is amazing writing because that thing of having a real lightness of touch, because after all, we do read novels partly for pleasure, but there also being so much more there that's something that i really admire and it's there in this book very much because as i say there's a day-to-day happenings the sort of social realism of these people

in india but there's a huge spiritual crisis going on beneath that, particularly in the character of Mrs. Moore. And this amazing bit at the end of the book where she realizes what a silly little religion Christianity is, despite the fact that that is her religion and the religion of everybody she knows. she knows. And India has massively destabilized her because suddenly she's aware of this Hindu idea of the unity of all living things. And that is totally new to her. Suddenly human relationships, which had to seem so important to her and which were indeed very important to Forster, suddenly seem slightly irrelevant. And I have to say that one of the things that shocked me reading this was, I suddenly thought, wait a minute, he wrote this in the 1920s and it's an environmental novel. And you think, how has that sort of suddenly happened?

But this question of the unity of all things, actually all of us now are thinking just happy human relationships aren't enough where there's this much bigger relationship we're going to have to have with this kind of boom in the cave which is nihilistic you know it actually sort of finishes Mrs Moore off one could argue it's terrifying to have to confront and so how is a book doing a bit of social comedy and having this this very profound discussion really of faith it's exciting that a novel can do all of that i think patrick did you have something you wanted to read it was just i hadn't really thought of it in terms of the environmental novel it's so many novels and doing so many things that it gets better even the more you discuss it but back to the Irish thing it's kind of there were little sentences like this

the collector made a small official joke as he sat down that with his entourage smile and the Indians who could not hear what he said felt that some new cruelty was afoot otherwise the sahibs would not chuckle so again everything's just half within earshot but their assumption through instinct is that we're going to be done over again we don't know how but again it's the guffaw it's the croydon man has in the shoes but what was that again didn't quite't quite hear it and there are little sentences like the air was thick with religion and rain you know that is so like the world I grew up in

you know it's just and sorry that's not a gafoor whatever way you feel about it, if Catholicism has lasted, you have to have a relationship with it. And the relationship that I would have with it is an awful lot different, shall we say, to the person who is making that comment.

That is from a position of elevation, whereas mine can't be because it's emotional. And there's all sorts of things that you work out. You may not particularly be faithful to consensus, but you don't like it being made fun of because it's yours, whatever. And they're all little things that kept alerting me. But I think your point was really fascinating there because all these things, this drawing room manners, he's slipping all these things. While you're engaging blood at armistice, there are huge questions of faith All these things, this drawing room manners, he's slipping all these things.

While you're engaging blood at armistice, there are huge questions of faith and crisis and spirit happening behind your back in the most subtle manner. And then when it lands, like a Hitchcock movie, you realise, my God, that's what he was at all the time. The more we examine it, the greater it gets. Now it's commercials. May I ask, the novel is structured

in three parts. Section one is called Mosque, section two is called Caves, and section three is called Temple. Temple was written almost ten years after the first two sections of the novel. The novel was put away for quite a long time. And when Forster returned to it,

he gave it to his friend Leonard Wolfe to read, to offer advice. And Leonard Wolfe said, you just need to write it. You just need to write it. You just need to write it. Get it off your back. Get it off your chest. And so Forster wrote it, the final section, in the space of a few months, after a period during which he had changed as a novelist, India had changed as a country. And I'd like to ask you whether you think that you can detect that strain, a reluctance almost to finish the novel

in the way the novel comes out. It's almost the last piece of fiction Forster writes ever before falling silent for the next 46 years. 46 years, yeah. Can you detect that in the structure, or is the structure self-defining? I think my understanding of the fact that the book was written over an 11-year period,

but there were actually really only two years right at the beginning where he was writing that then this very long gap i think what stalled him was the marabar caves and i think what he couldn't work out was what happened there and also i think he i imagine speaking as a novelist that he may have struggled to leave it as a mystery, that he didn't want to say exactly what happened. And the way to present that, that you've sort of shown the reader enough but you've left this great gap that is unfilled. And of course he needed to get that sorted

because he otherwise couldn't write the rest of the novel. And it is a wonderful moment in the novel when Aziz comes out of the caves and he sees Miss Quested running down the hill and he sees the dropped field glasses and he sees these people hurrying away. And there's clear that something has really gone wrong but you don't know what it is and yes the way that he manages that in order to leave that gap that we do always know that Aziz was innocent he wasn't actually in the cave where this happened but I think also there's a big question about what happens to Adela. And to me also, obviously, it's a huge novel of sexual repression. You feel it. You feel it in Aziz and Fielding. But you also feel it in poor Miss Quested, who's been sort of brought out to India, sort of married this man.

And the truth is coming to her that, in fact, she's not sexually attracted to him at all. And in a way, you think, what assaulted her in the cave? And I think what assaulted her was actually a huge sexual feeling for Aziz and the realization that she felt absolutely nothing for Ronnie. And, of course, she is massively destabilized by this. Her whole life is going to fall to bits because of this and so so many different things are happening in the cave because as well as you know what's happening to Adela there's this boom and this echo and and they've managed to leave the two people who were particularly needed on that day um Fielding and Godbole have been left behind so they sort of don't have that protection

so I can see how if he couldn't get that sorted out he couldn't write the rest of the novel but somehow it all kind of worked out well because the fact he was stalled there as you say then means he probably wrote a very different end to the novel than he might otherwise have written I think. Yeah I think he's created something in the caves that he doesn't know. As Patrick said, he's trying to push beyond social realism.

And the caves are, what happens there is ambiguous. It feels like Keatsian negative capability. He creates this scenario where he doesn't really want anyone to know what's happened there because as a novelist, his work has been straining up to this point. He's brought all the characters there and then something happens and then it's fascinating to me that it took him so long to go back to it.

I was trying to see if there was evidence that he'd tried other endings on they rejected them there is yeah i mean i find it it's almost knowing what we know about forster now as you were saying alice it's all things we didn't know but including we know with the benefit of hindsight that's the end for Forster as a novelist. And the novel is almost a metaphor for that drying up, that sense that meaning can't be imposed. Meaning cannot be neat and tidy. And Forster's realisation of that is the actual block. It's fascinating to me that that final section is written,

he says, screaming at the desk. Yeah. Because it's futile by the standards he's set himself. And yet it's so glorious, Patrick, that final third of this novel is one of the great closing fugues of a 20th century novel. Can I read a couple of paragraphs just to give people... Because the thing is, the book does not...

The book, up to this point, you don't expect that it's going to explode into this kind of high... this high strain of philosophical prose. And for those of you who don't read, the final section begins with... in Maus in this... with this amazing Hindu ceremony of the birth of God.

And it's an, I mean, just in terms of the pure prose, the description of the scene, it's extraordinary. But he hits this kind of vein, which I just, you wouldn't imagine this if you just read the first two sections of the book. But the clock struck midnight, and simultaneously the rending note of the conch broke forth, followed by the trumpeting of elephants. All who had packets of powder threw them at the altar,

and in the rosy dust and incense and clanging shouts, infinite love took upon itself the form of Sri Krishna and saved the world. All sorrow was annihilated, not only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars. All became joy, all laughter. There had never been disease, nor doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty, fear. Some jumped in the air, others flung themselves prone and embraced the bare feet of the universal lover. The woman behind the birder slapped and shrieked. The little girl slipped out and danced by herself,

her black pigtails flying. Not an orgy of the body. The tradition of that shrine forbade it. But the human spirit had tried by a desperate contortion to ravish the unknown, flinging down science and history in the struggle. Yes, beauty herself. Did it succeed? Books written afterwards say yes, but how, if there is such an event, can it be remembered

afterwards? How can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not only from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself cannot retain them. He may think, if he chooses, that he has been with God, but as soon as he thinks it, it becomes history and falls under the rules of time. Wow. Whoa. Whoa. They do say if you want to kill at Dartington,

read some metaphysical prose on a Sunday morning. That was tremendous, eh? Tremendous. I mean, as we're talking about the petty snobbery and the social comedy and the Edwardian-ness and the pootling, and, I mean, he was really going for it by the end of this book. And I think that... I can't quite remember why I didn't notice that when I read it the first time round. Patrick?

It was just when Alice was talking about destabilization, which you mentioned a couple of times in different contexts. And I think that's what I found kind of interesting because maybe boom, the sound in the caves is the sound of the world becoming asunder. Let's say in the Irish context, like a sort of a belly pock, you have this quietude over a period of generations, but there's something rumbling underneath and it's ready to move, you know.

You find it in language. He says it here. He's talking about a lot of muttering and a lot of whispering behind closed doors, you know. A legend sprang up that an Englishman had killed his mother for trying to save an Indian's life. And this rumour hides in rubbish heaps and moves when no one is looking.

So the whole natural world is going... Because we don't understand how people who had maybe lived in a peculiar subject kind of dominant, they got on very well. And then at some point in history, some force beyond our understanding and maybe it's impossible to resolve a novel like this because we no matter how much knowledge scientific we still don't know because the dead haven't come back to tell us and they're in no hurry to do it no matter what advances we make so boom and the moving legends and rumors and whispers of rubbish heaps end in amritsar or you know uh bloody sunday whatever whatever it is you know the people involved

don't know what's going on why did we do this and maybe are remorseful for the rest of their days. So it's no surprise to me that he couldn't finish it. I didn't know that, actually. That took ten years. But the sky has the last word, remember? The sky said, blah, blah, blah. That's the end of the novel. So the sky is the main character, really.

That glimpse of the infinite, that to me is the ongoing theme of the book. Totally. The effect of the infinite. I'd just like to read a little bit from when Mrs. Moore emerges from the cave having heard the boom that Patrick has just mentioned. And for those of you who haven't read the novel,

this in a sense is the beginning of a process which, for Mrs. Moore, unravels her totally over the remainder of the book. Professor Godbully had never mentioned an echo. It never impressed him, perhaps. There are some exquisite echoes in India. There is the whisper round the dome at Bijapur. There are the long, solid sentences that voyage through the air at Mandu and return unbroken to their creator. The echo in a Marabar cave is not like these. It is entirely devoid of distinction.

Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. Boom is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or boom or u-boom, utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, Hull, hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeal of a boot, all produce boom. Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle, but is externally watchful. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins. Echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes which writhe independently. She took out her writing pad and began,

Dear Stella, dear Ralph, then stopped and looked at the queer valley and their feeble invasion of it. Even the elephant had become a nobody. Her eye rose from it to the entrance tunnel. No, she did not wish to repeat that experience. The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and the smells she could forget. But the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. That's brilliant.

Now, I'm confident this comparison has never been made before. The writer that reminds me of is H.P. Lovecraft, writing at the same time as E.M. Forster about the loathsome cosmic horror that lurks just beyond the veil. That sense of the infinite and the human being tiny in comparison to it, which can be glimpsed only briefly and wreak terrible havoc. Now, that's not bad for Forster to channel a kind of sense of a pre-existentialism,

existential horror, along with all these other things we're attributing to him within this novel you can also sort of see why he ran out of road can't you yeah it's too big like martin shaw was talking here last night about the book of job opening up the wonder eye so that you could see the infinite and i've always been terrified since i was a child of seeing the infinite you know who says it's benign you know who could tell you that the the deity if it's a deity and what you see through this wonder eye maybe you're not meant to i don't know but that's the boom for me and it's interesting to say hp lovecraft because along with the social comedy and the comedy of errors,

I was thinking this is like a Hammer Horror movie. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Oh, no, we don't want to go any further, you know. And the guy jumps down off the coach and clears off and he's left there looking at the castle and the bats and the infinite. So it works on a kind of pulp trash level as well. So we're getting everything for our money here. It was also a bestse Infinite. So it works on a kind of pulp trash level as well. So we're getting everything for our money here. It was also a bestseller.

You know that? It was his bestselling novel. It was his bestselling novel. Estimated to have sold a million copies by the time he died. Did it? And obviously adapted for the screen in 1984 by David Lean.

In previous episodes of Batlisted, we played a clip from film adaptations about the book we 1984 by David Lean. In previous episodes of Backlisted, we played a clip from film adaptations about the book we've been talking about. As I say this, this strikes me as a bizarre thing to say, but it's true. If you've listened to the previous two episodes, you'll know both of which have featured Penelope Keith in a minor role.

Now, surprisingly, Penelope Keith does not feature in the film adaptation of A Passage to India. However, John, the director of the film adaptation of The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, called A Touch of Love, that was Waris Hussain.

Waris Hussain directed an adaptation of A Passage to India for the BBC in 1965 starring Virginia McKenna which is in itself a remarkable thing to have happened in the 1960s Waris Hussain being the only Asian director working for the BBC in that era And is the infinite and what we've been talking about referenced in any significant way in that adaptation?

In that adaptation or in Lean's adaptation? No. That's what's so interesting. So it's a sort of social comedy and a comedy of manners more than maybe that. Well, it's a more, I think, Alice, as I remember it, the Lean version is very much of a piece with the way of seeing the novel as the blurb we just heard. Yeah, yeah. It's about racial tension. He makes it as a...

I mean, it's an epic in the David Lean style, but the centre of it is political upheaval. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is how perhaps we would have seen it then and we can see it now. But as we've been talking about the book, none of these adaptations can contain what the novel has in it.

He says there's a lovely thing in an essay he wrote on criticism which gives you a clue. This was written a few years, but it was written in 1948, so a long time after he'd finished the book, but this is when he's become of become the... He's become really a critic and a kind of grand. I mean, it's also worth... As well as being critically successful, he was massively...

He became a grandee of literature and was awarded... I think he was one of the first people to be made a Royal Society Literature Lifetime Fellow, all that kind of stuff. So he was seen as a successful person. So there is a certain kind of oratund quality to his later criticism. But I think this is really interesting about creativity. So what about the creative state?

In it, a man is taken out of himself, a woman, obviously. He lets down, as it were, a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of this mixture he makes a work of art. It may be a good work of art or a bad one. We're not here examining the question of quality. But whether it is good or bad, it will have been compounded in this unusual way

and he will wonder afterwards how he did it. Such seems to be the creative process. It may employ much technical ingenuity and worldly knowledge, it may profit by critical standards, but mixed up with it is this stuff from the bucket, this subconscious stuff, which is not procurable on demand. And when this process is over, when the picture or symphony or lyric or novel or whatever it is is complete, the artist, looking back on it, will wonder how on earth he did it. And indeed, he did not do it on earth. That's just quite thinking about where I can sort of think of him

rereading that final section and thinking, what was I on? What was I taking when I wrote this? Because it's definitely a lot of the bucket there. I mean, I know the frame is that it's an extraordinary Indian ceremony, and he writes about that. As we've said, you can't get away in this novel that he has a complicated relationship with dealing with... Now, there's a lot of the Indian and the English, as Patrick has said,

and he makes great use of that. But I think the other thing, as well as the imaginative, in terms of the politics of this novel, going back to it, I think you would read it very differently. We're reading it very differently now, looking at Modi's India, than we might have even been in the 1950s after partition. I mean, it's good enough novel, I think, to keep working in a political context as well as an aesthetic context. Alice, as we've said several times now, the novel can be read in various different ways. It changes

depending on who we are and where we are like any novel does but it seems particular I wonder then could you as a an admirer of Forster's work what are the continuities that you see between a passage to India and the novels of 10 years earlier I think there's always a humanism there. There is a belief in the primacy of human relationships. So it's interesting that that then comes almost under attack in this last novel. But I think also what I love about all Forster is he's always subtle. He's never hitting you over the head with stuff. And all of his characters are nuanced. I mean, if we think about the forgotten character, Ronnie, who is the man that Adela doesn't marry,

and yes, he seems a bit of an idiot, and he is. But actually, Forster is careful to write into the book the fact that Ronnie came to India with sort of progressive ideas and he was going to do something a bit different and he wanted to discover about India and whatever and what we see in Forster is people whose society has boxed into a certain mode of living and I think Forster sees society as a sort of prison you know because Ronnie forgets all of that and he becomes this sort of two-dimensional character because he's within this world, which is colonialism, which demands that you behave in this kind of way. So even though there's a sort of level at which he's a hateful character, actually, we can't really hate him that much because we know that he did want to do something different. him that much because we know that he did want to do something different and that's very much Forster and even though Forster based Aziz on his very dear friend who he loved deeply and their love could never really speak its name he again he's not going to make Aziz into this perfect character you know at the end Aziz makes wrong assumptions about what's happened and Fielding and his friendship crumbles because of that

and so all the characters are just this mix of all these different things and that's really what a good novel does is it stops us from stereotyping people it forces us to see the nuance and to see that even in the worst people or we may think of the worst people they're created by their circumstances and their times and they probably don't manage to rise above that and I also just love in this novel and I think it's very important you know she's satirizing Miss Quested because she has come to discover the real India and you know what Forster's saying at the end is how stupid is that there were hundreds and hundreds of Indias and of course you know literally they there are aren't they it's a massive continent with different religions and

languages and all of these things and and I love that he does that and again that strikes me differently now as that it would have done when I was young, in that, unfortunately, we're in a phase of literature where people represent things. And I really am sort of on a bit of a one woman war against the phrase represent, because I just I don't think anybody represents anybody else, actually, unless they're elected to do so. And so this idea that he again, one of the things we cannot know at the end of this, but we cannot possibly know India. We, you know, even the people who live there can't know it. So he writes with that lovely uncertainty and that nuance and that acceptance of the fact that it's a muddle. It's not even a mystery. It's a muddle. And you can't know it all or even a small part of it, actually. and you can't know it all, or even a small part of it, actually. And I think, yes, at the end he's sort of balancing that,

he's trying to hang on to human relationships and say, all we can do is only connect, as he says. Not in this novel, but at the end of Howard's End he says that, doesn't he? But actually he feels even that crumbling. He's kinder,er though to some types of people than others yeah right Forster has the recurring trope of the older maternal figure as befits a man who lived with his mother for many years he tends to give in Howard's End in this novel in a passage to India the older woman is given the moments of wisdom, insight,

but he likes then, in true conflicted manner, killing them. No spoilers for those novels, but they tend to die. They tend to have their moments, their compassion, their wisdom, and then he snuffs them out. His bucket was quite a big bucket, I think. We're probably getting towards the end in it, but I wondered, Patrick, did you want to have another little reading from the book just to take us out?

Well, again, getting back on my hobby horse, there's just a little line that he said. He only knew that no-one ever told him the truth, although he had been in the country for over 20 years. James Joyce has an essay called Ireland at the Bar, where an old countryman is accused of being complicit in a murder, but he can't speak English. And Joyce describes witnessing this thing where this old man,

who is waving his arms frantically and weeping, trying to explain what it is that exonerates him from ever being involved in this murder because he wasn't there. But the judge, sticking to that, doesn't understand what he's saying. Neither do any of the magistrate' assistants and their court personnel. So it calls in in a colonial situation, of which Ireland has to be included, really, what is the nature of truth?

You know, if you're speaking an Oraton language like Gaelic and everything, please stick to the point. But first of all, you don't know what the point is because he's waving like a crazy marionette. And there you have people, both English and Irish or Indian, as prisoners of history and language particularly. So you've got this immense vault of maybe a benign deity,

or maybe not, looking down on these marionettes, waving their arms, and the judge thinking he's doing the right thing. The old guy, this is the greatness of Foster, you you see it's no use writing about empire you know it's all very well pulling down statues and everything else you know what i mean getting passionate but can we not please look what did people think they were doing it is the business of art to find out this and if it if it isn't we shouldn't bother we really shouldn't bother what did they think they were doing did they think they were right

were they in some ways right I don't know it's not my business to kind of pass judgment on this but through people like geniuses like Foster as you say quite eloquently is nuanced I think that's why there's a claim to be one of the great novels who thinks they will go from

this place to read The Passage to India again? Everybody! Good! I think we're going to have to call it quits there which has been a wonderful episode, it's marvellous to be back in front of a live audience I would say as befits a writer whose

initials are EMF, this session has been unbelievable Thank you, thank you alice thank you thank you thanks everyone see you next time thank you bye thank you for listening if you want show notes with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 191 that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed in this podcast you can visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter facebook and instagram if you want to hear backlisted without ads subscribe to our

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