A Passage To India

by E.M. Forster

This was fairly hard work actually. I didn't like any of the characters and the subject was difficult and hard to sympathise with. E.M. Forster's writing is clearly very beautiful and the descriptions of scenery, relationships and religion were so vivid and clever and I really appreciated what he was doing with it all. The book is obviously very important and its very interesting to look at a picture of human nature in such a way, politically but more than that, generally. At the end, the base message seems to be that human nature and the way we have constructed our world makes it very difficult for two men to meet and just be very good friends. Much as they might try, life and politics will destroy it because of our instinctive tribal mentality. I find this very sad and hope desperately that it does not apply to me and definitely not to my children's generation.

On the other side of the book, the details about England still trying to force itself on India. It was interesting to read about and made the English look rather preposterous. The whole idea of barging into a country and forcing rule upon it is quite odd to me and comes across this way in the book but unfortunately is a truth that is still relevant today. I like that there is a book that makes it seem silly. But that was what I was left with at the end, that it was all important and sad but really just very silly, that people can't just let each other be and not create ridiculous ways to maintain control over each other and in the end not just be friends.
To end, I just want to include some of my favourite beautiful passages...

"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 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 earth and them is as nothing to the distance behind them; and that further distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue."

"It was the last moment of the light, and as he gazed at the Marabar Hills they seemed to move graciously towards him like a queen, and their charm became the sky's. At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill."

"She didn't think what had happened, or even remember in the ordinary way of memory, but she returned to the Marabar Hills, and spoke from the across a sort of darkness to Mr McBryde. The fatal day recurred, in every detail, but now she was of it and not of it at the same time, and this double relation gave it indescribable splendour. Why had she thought the expedition 'dull'? Now the sun rose again, the elephant waited, the pale masses of the rock flowed round her and presented the first cave; she entered, and a match was reflected in the polished walls - all beautiful and significant, though she had been blind to it at the time."

Image