| | On the surface, this little account of some British folks in colonial India starts slowly, peaks early, then sort of trickles out on an entirely different tangent, or rather with no tangent at all. Those expecting something exciting and thrilling to come out of the trial of an Indian man for assault of a young female British tourist will be disappointed, as the book ends up not really being about that at all--the whole trumped-up saga of the alleged assault serves merely as a set of circumstances that allow Forster to explore Anglo-Indian relations under stress. But the best thing about the book, and the thing that may most disappoint casual readers, is that Forster, having examined his subjects in the trial and aftermath, has no problem with leaving unresolved threads hanging and moving along to later, relatively unconnected periods in their lives.
Well what a gosh darn thing to do in a story. Fortunately, this isn't really a story. Forster strikes me as more of an historian of those nebulous unquantifiable things that you can't put on a timeline in any meaningful way but which were nevertheless there, hanging tensely in the air around the inhabitants of that period. The book doesn't really have a beginning or an ending--the characters existed before it came along, and after it tails off; Forster shows you a bit of their world. "This is how things were." He gives us a portrait rather than a novel.
And if you're unacquainted with colonial India, the portrait is worth your while. East meets West, done innumerable times, shows surprises and insights in the collisions of Forster's characters, festivals, cultures, laws, morals, and religions. That his account doesn't really end with the last page, while perhaps somewhat destructive to our expectations, strikes me now as rather more true to life than most stories. |
|
|