Arctic Summer
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
Against the backdrop of a world in flux at the start of a new century, Arctic Summer portrays the life of British writer E. M. Forster: his inner turmoil, his search for love and the story behind one of the greatest novels in English, A Passage to India.
In 1912, Forster follows his friend Syed Ross Masood to India. It is on this journey – travelling around the country while it is still under British rule – that the seeds of his novel are planted. But it will be another twelve years, and a second time spent in India, before his book is published. Between these two journeys lie the writing of an unpublishable novel, the outbreak of the First
World War, and a long stay in Alexandria, where he has an unlikely affair with an Egyptian tram conductor.
As we follow Forster across continents – stuttering, aching, his love mostly unrequited – Galgut captures with colour and exquisite delicacy the England, India and Egypt of the era. Meticulously researched, Arctic Summer conjures the figure of Forster in all his contradictory genius, providing a fascinating glimpse into the creation of a masterpiece
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
