Degradation had its own sensual power, and no sooner was he hurrying away from one encounter than his mind was leaping ahead to the next one. India scraped up to the surface a kind of buried animism in him, a propensity towards the mystical.Īnd an idea of happiness is always better than the happiness itself…īut the shame, he slowly realised, was part of the point. But he didn’t entirely disbelieve either. He didn’t believe – not really – in the supernatural. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. And he magically recreates psychological climate and an atmosphere of that long gone era. Moral qualms and shortage of willpower – I believe Damon Galgut perfectly depicts his protagonist’s drawbacks. There was something in human affection that was at odds with reason, he thought, like a kind of mild insanity. Love had vexed his mind, making him irritable and irrational. Forster was an unhappy man, tormented by his desires and doubts, and he lived a miserable life but his moral suffering did make a great writer out of him. 'Galgut inhabits with such sympathetic completeness, and in prose of such modest excellence that he starts to breathe on the page.' - Financial TimesĮ.M. Damon Galgut's reimagining of Forster's life is a clear and sympathetic psychological probing of one of Britain's finest novelists. Shifting across the landscapes of India, Egypt, and England, Forster's life is informed by his relationships-from the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el-Adl, to the Greek poet and literary titan C.

But it will be another twelve years and a second stay in India before the publication of his finest work, A Passage to India. Slowly, the strands of a story begin to gather in Forster's mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. He also finds himself surprisingly freed to explore his 'minorite' desires as secretary to a most unusual Maharajah. During his travels, the novelist confronts his fraught childhood and falls in unrequited love with his closest friend.

On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer's block, attempting to come to terms with his art and his homosexuality. The year is 1912, and the SS Birmingham is approaching India. Forester's journey of self-discovery ( The Times, London). This 'beautifully written and utterly compelling' novel by the acclaimed South African author traces E.

Arctic summer galgut