In the Library
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster, 1924
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 37
- Length
- Length 101k words
£1.99
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In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."
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About the book
Boum. That is the only sound the Marabar Caves return, the same dead syllable for a hymn, a footstep, or a whispered name, and into that flattening echo Forster sends a hopeful little picnic that will not survive it. Dr. Aziz, a warm, quicksilver Indian doctor, has befriended two Englishwomen newly off the boat and still convinced that ordinary decency can reach across the Raj. In the dark of the caves something happens, or seems to, and an accusation rises that splits the colonial station along its racial seam. Forster never tells you what occurred underground, because the not-knowing is the whole subject: how empire makes meaning itself impossible between two people who might, under any other sky, have been friends. The kindest Englishman in the book stands by Aziz and still cannot hold the friendship together. At the close, two men ride out wanting to embrace, and the horses swerve apart; the earth says not yet, and the sky says not here.