Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut

by Unknown Author

Hardcover

About the author

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Reviews

[Pamela Larson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Classics book club at Nashville’s Parnassus independent bookstore (owned by author Ann Patchett) recently read E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Our book club leader mentioned that if we enjoyed Maurice, we might want to read Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut, a historical fiction novel about author E.M. Forster. I did just that, and found the book to be exquisite! The book is set in the early 1900s, it begins in Forster’s home in England, and then takes him to India, back to England, and Egypt. Forster, called Morgan (his name was Edward Morgan Forster), is a homosexual when this was not only taboo, but illegal. Galgut’s writing makes you feel the longing that Forster has for male companionship, both sexually but mostly for friendship and companionship. The author captures the caste system in India and Egypt, and the hideous colonial attitudes and actions of the British brilliantly. The plot (for those who lean Puritanical) ventures to graphic sexual practices, but is both necessary and appropriate to paint the needs of Forster. During Forster’s journey, he was able to produce his famous and classic novel, A Passage to India.

E.M. Forster lived with his mother, Lily, in England, when not traveling. They were very close. When Lily was dying, this conversation was exchanged between the two:

“ ‘I shan’t be long with you,’ she told him.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘But I shall have your love.’ “

“He was very glad, afterwards, for that moment. It was a bond of great complexity that was being annulled and it would leave its guilts and regrets. His mourning was not small. He had been preparing for it imaginatively over the past ten years, but there was no way to conceive of how deep the event would go. It struck a bass note in him, close to the center, which vibrated outwards through the rest of his life. In the beginning he had sometimes wanted to die too. He broke down at peculiar moments, often out in public, felling how alone he was, remembering some arbitrary conversation. But it was also true that part of what wrung him was the awful knowledge that her vanishing had lifted off a great weight, so that he felt he could breathe more easily It was terrible to feel that; he did not want her gone. On the contrary, he conjured her continually. He had put honeysuckle on her pillow when had left; he would take back a leaf from an Indian tree to lay on her grave. Her death had made it possible for him to be there- a sort of gift. The journey had been a great distraction, because she had never been to that country, it had no association with her, in that sense, India was clean.”

Earlier in the book describing colonialism in India:

“He could never live here, he thought. Not as these people did. Even if political affairs were never discussed, he experienced his remoteness from his white kin as almost a physical difference. This was a vigorous, outdoor word, full of sports and guns. If you didn’t join the club of play polo or shoot tigers or subdue barbarous tribes on the border, you were immediately an unsound quantity; the more so if, like Morgan, you lived in your mind a great deal and wrote books.”

…

“What made it worse was that, although his sympathies were usually with the Indians, he couldn’t always like them more than his countrymen. Whatever he did, he was always to some extent a Sahib, and the room for antipathy was vast. On those scattered occasions when a true understanding was reached, he always felt disproportionately grateful.”