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Summary
Summary
This "beautifully written and utterly compelling" novel by the acclaimed South African author traces E. M. Forester's journey of self-discovery ( The Times , London).
The year is 1912, and the SS Birmingham is approaching India. On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer's block, attempting to come to terms with his art and his homosexuality. During his travels, the novelist confronts his fraught childhood and falls in unrequited love with his closest friend. He also finds himself surprisingly freed to explore his "minorite" desires as secretary to a most unusual Maharajah.
Slowly, the strands of a story begin to gather in Forster's mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. But it will be another twelve years and a second stay in India before the publication of his finest work, A Passage to India . Shifting across the landscapes of India, Egypt, and England, Forster's life is informed by his relationships--from the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el-Adl, to the Greek poet and literary titan C. P. Cavafy. Damon Galgut's reimagining of Forster's life is a clear and sympathetic psychological probing of one of Britain's finest novelists.
"Galgut inhabits [Forster] with such sympathetic completeness, and in prose of such modest excellence that he starts to breathe on the page."-- Financial Times
Author Notes
Damon Galgut is the author of The Good Doctor , a 2003 novel that won the Commonwealth Prize (Africa Region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a Strange Room (Europa, 2010) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2013, Galgut was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Talented South African writer Galgut (The Good Doctor) returns with a well- researched if occasionally leaden novel about E.M. Forster. Set mostly between Forster's first trip to India in 1912, during which he visits the caves that play so great a role in A Passage to India, and the 1924 publication of that classic, the novel explores Forster's intense, sexually tinged friendships with an Indian lawyer, Syed Ross Masood, to whom he dedicated Passage, and the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl. Galgut chronicles Forster's struggle to complete his "Indian novel" and his "invisible, double life" as a homosexual. The avidity of what were then termed Morgan's "minorite" desires are effectively conveyed, as is the timidity that often frustrates them; Morgan is 37 when he loses his virginity to a British soldier in Alexandria. Unfortunately, some hammy descriptions of Forster at work weigh on the prose ("In one moment, as if lit up by lightning, he had seen the whole arc of events"), and the cameos made by the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and a fulminating D.H. Lawrence seem perfunctory. Any flatness stands out: the cost of fictionalizing a great writer. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In this novel based on the life of E.M. Forster, Galgut (In a Strange Room, 2010, etc.) focuses on the novelist's visits to India, his time in Egypt and his homoerotic yearnings. The opening sets the tone. Morgan, as he is known, is on a vessel steaming toward India in 1912. A British army officer tells him of his many sexual conquests of Indian men and boys; Morgan finds this titillating. He's a timid mama's boy, a closeted gay man, still a virgin at 33. His four published novels have examined heterosexual relationships; his gay novel, Maurice, will be published posthumously. Yet Morgan has known romance. In England some years before, he became friends with Masood, an aristocratic young Muslim Indian. While Masood gently rejected Morgan's advances, the friendship blossomed. "Friendship is your Empire, Morgan," declared the anti-imperialist Indian. Aside from his reunion with Masood, his first visit to India introduces Morgan to its religious and caste divisions and its frequently obnoxious British rulers; it also sows the first seeds of A Passage to India, written years later. Another opportunity to travel arises in 1915. The Great War is underway. Morgan works for the Red Cross in Alexandria, visiting hospitalized soldiers. He finally has his first sexual experience, fellating a soldier on a secluded beach: "this was the realest moment of his life." Even if we accept that, Galgut's focus on Morgan's sexual needs is reductive. You wouldn't know, apart from passing references (Lytton Strachey, the Woolfs), that he was a Bloomsbury figure himself. Another romance catches fire in Alexandria. Mohammed is a humble tram conductor; like Masood, he isn't gay, but he indulges Morgan's needs to an extent while cherishing their friendship. Most of this has been documented in four biographies, as Galgut acknowledges. Forster remains elusive in this unbalanced account. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Brilliantly conceived and executed, Galgut's novelized biography of the great British writer E. M. Forster begins in 1912 with Forster's first voyage to India. His purpose in going there is to reconnect with a young Indian, Syed Ross Masood, whom he had befriended when he taught the young man Latin. For Forster, a repressed homosexual, however, it was more than friendship he desired. He had fallen desperately in love with Masood, who was heterosexual. Galgut does an exceptionally good job of conveying Forster's sadness, yearning, and frustration, all of which came into play again when he later fell in love with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, who was also heterosexual but permitted the occasional sexual encounter. While much of the novel focuses on Forster's sometimes heartbreaking search for love, it also deals with his nine-year-long writer's block that finally ended when he was able to complete his masterpiece, A Passage to India. If Galgut takes readers into Forster's heart, he also takes them into his mind and its own journey to self-discovery. Along the way readers will encounter such Forster friends as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and others, all the while becoming immersed in the book's beautifully realized and often exotic settings. Two of Galgut's earlier novels were shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and it is likely that this memorable new one will also be a contender for that and other glittering awards.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE TERM "literary historical fiction" might be used for noncommercial novels set in the past and full of thoughtful allegorical implication. Or one could employ it for a highly specific subgenre, that portion of "fictional biography" consisting of novels about real-life writers. This territory seems to be expanding of late, with Colm Toibin's re-creation of Henry James ("The Master"), Jay Parini's incarnation of Melville ("The Passages of H.M.") and David Lodge's imagining of H.G. Wells's energetic sex and writing lives ("A Man of Parts"). "Arctic Summer," by the South African novelist Damon Galgut, now joins this shelf. A judicious, well-proportioned look at the personal life of E.M. Forster, it's a solid contribution to a literary niche, though a relatively unadventurous extension of Galgut's own oeuvre, which includes a splendid short novel about post-apartheid life in one of South Africa's former "homelands" ("The Good Doctor") and a series of three linked novellas called "In a Strange Room." In that work, Galgut sometimes alternated the first and third person in a single sentence, a point-of-view experiment that may have proved more remarkable than interesting, but was certainly bold. Readers of Forster's own letters and P. N. Furbank's biography will come to Galgut's novel knowing the story of Forster's fitful liberation, both on and off the page, into greater sexual freedom and frankness. In "Arctic Summer," they will find a narrative voice reminiscent of Forster's own calm, percipient one. Galgut depicts the novelist participating in "buttoned-down conversation about books and travel and opera and architecture" all the while unable to "keep his gaze from sliding sideways, to the figure of the servant who bent in to clear the plates." Dominated by his widowed mother, Morgan Forster experiences a cripplingly prolonged adolescence inside "the old, powdery, frangible halo of women who encircled him." He manages to produce several youthful novels of increasing depth - most notably "Howards End" - while remaining aware that he probably lacks the experience to create something unfettered and truly authentic: "He was 34 and virginal and would perhaps be virginal all his life." Forster confesses his attraction to Syed Ross Masood, his Indian tutee, to a "locked journal" and begins furtively to write gay-themed stories that he shows only to particular friends. The longest and most important of these, the novel "Maurice," will not be published until 1971, a year after his death. Its subject matter makes it unfit for bookshops, and its happy ending seems forbidden by life itself. The fate of Ernest Merz, an acquaintance of Forster who hangs himself in 1909, perhaps in a moment of sexual despair, seems more socially acceptable. Confident, fast-talking young Masood displays, at least on the surface, an emotional forthrightness, upbraiding Forster for his own stiffness and reserve. But when they are together during Forster's first trip to India, shortly before the Great War, Masood sharply rebuffs the writer's attempted kiss, leaving Forster to conceal an angry shame during one more well-practiced retreat into the "willed cheerfulness" of "his usual life, mild and diligent." A kind of love, incomplete but transforming, finally arrives during the war, when Forster serves in Egypt as a "searcher," charged with "interviewing the wounded in hospitals for information about those who might have gone missing or untraced." His real discovery proves to be Mohammed el-Adl, a tram conductor in Alexandria, with whom he achieves a measure of actual intimacy. The class divide remains enormous, and Mohammed may view Forster's lust as "a pity for you and a disgrace," but the two men kiss and caress and engage in some emancipating, childlike horseplay: "This kind of companionship had far more value to Morgan than their few, fumbling physical encounters." Forster is well aware that he idealizes the relationship, but however haltingly and amid whatever upheavals - Mohammed marries, has a child, is imprisoned during anticolonial violence and at last becomes fatally ill - the two do obey Forster's most famous dictate: Only connect. Forster's second stay in India has him serving as secretary to the maharajah of De was, a semiautonomous kingdom that Galgut describes as something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Still in search of tenderness and affection, Forster remains burdened by a "humiliating and boring" lust. The rajah disapproves of homosexuality but is realistic enough to see that some regular "relief" be provided Forster by a local barber. On his first trip to the subcontinent, the writer had concluded that "all human interaction was power." In his new sexual arrangement, this believer in gentle intimacy experiences a sadistic thrill that fills him with "all the force of the Empire." Forster struggles with both self-disgust ("Degradation had its own sensual power") and the effort to keep believing in his workin-progress, the clash-of-cultures novel that will become "A Passage to India." He begins to fear that fiction is "too artificial and self-conscious ... ever to convey anything real." Back in England he gets on with the job, but his colleague Virginia Woolf sees the long-term problem. When Forster says "I don't think I am a novelist," she objectively agrees, perhaps aware before he is of how "the world that interested him was disappearing, or already gone, buried under motorcars and machinery and the smoke of war." After "A Passage to India," for the almost half-century left to him, Forster would publish stories and nonfiction, but no novels. GALGUT'S RENDITIONS ARE always convincing if sometimes a bit programmatic. He can be overly emphatic in announcing themes and conflicts already sharply delineated in Forster's work: "The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not." There are striking lines here and there ("His loneliness was now so big that it had become his life"), but also occasional confusions. We're told that India brings out "a capable other Morgan, who traversed great distances and made decisive choices," but two pages later learn that without his servant "India would have fallen in on Morgan, burying him in confusion." These waverings extend to tone and diction. Two uses of the word "lifestyle" do a lot to undo whatever period feeling comes from deploying antique sexual terms like "Uranian" and Forster's own "minorite." "Arctic Summer" (Forster's title for a novel he never completed) does tend in places to read more like biography than fiction: "At the start of 1915, his spirits were briefly lifted by a new acquaintanceship." This is not entirely avoidable in a subgenre that depends, like all historical fiction, on documentary evidence and pastiche. But the use of what Galgut calls "seeded quotes" and "adapted excerpts" from his long list of sources may signify almost too much adherence to fact and reality, a conscientiousness that inhibits daring. This is a dignified and absorbing novel, but one feels inclined to urge its author, as one might have the young Forster, to break loose and let go. Searching for affection, Forster is burdened by a 'humiliating and boring' lust. THOMAS MALLON'S most recent books are "Watergate: A Novel" and "Yours Ever: People and Their Letters." He teaches at George Washington University.