A Passage To India by E.M. Forster - Rerun

Backlisted

This episode features a live discussion at the Byline Festival where hosts and guests Alice Jolly and Patrick McCabe analyze E.M. Forster's 1924 novel A

Key takeaways

• Alice Jolly reveals she delayed reading Forster as a teenager to preserve his works for her future, noting modern readers now recognize strong queer subtext alongside colonial critique.
• Patrick McCabe draws parallels between the Anglo-Indian dynamics in the novel and historical Irish-British class relations, highlighting subtle linguistic cues of paternalism and resentment.

Main topics

• Colonialism and post-colonial legacy
• Queer subtext in early 20th-century literature

Notable quotes

"It's not my business to kind of pass judgment on this. But for people like geniuses like Foster, you see. It's nuanced."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how A Passage to India continues to evolve in

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Hi, it's E.M. Forster. Hi, it's John. Speaker 2 (0:02) Hi, it's Ian Banks. Speaker 5 (0:05) Welcome to a rerun of... We're giddy today. It's not really E.M. Forster and Ian Banks. It's me, Andy, and... Nicky. And we're doing a rerun of a show we recorded, Speaker 4 (0:17) when? Three years ago, I think. It was summer 2023, recorded live at the Byline Festival, and the book we were discussing was E.M. Forster's... Passage to India. Who were our guests back then in 2023? Patrick McKay, novelist, butcher boy. Wonderful. Pogue Mahone. And Alice Jolly, novelist. Also wonderful. Wonderful. Who won the Walter Scott Historical Prize this year for her, I think, brilliant and under-read and under-appreciated novel, The Matchbox Girl, which was about a girl who was one of the pupils of Dr Asperger in Vienna during the war. So a brilliant book. But they're both on fire in this particular episode. Pat manages somehow to make access to India about the British in Ireland. And they both love this book, the book, which always helps. But Alice said she read E.M. Forster when she was a teenager and had to stop reading his novels because she didn't want to think there was going to be a time in her life when there wasn't another E.M. Forster book to read, which I'm not sure how that's... finally panned out for her. Speaker 5 (1:27) This is one of my favourite shows because as long-time listeners know, I rarely listen back and I carry forward the memory of the actual event if I possibly can. And my memory of the actual event of this one is when I say it's not rehearsed, I barely even met anyone before I arrived on stage and started talking. I come a long distance down to the Byline Festival in, where is it? It's Speaker 4 (1:52) near, it was, but Dartington, near Totnes. Near Speaker 5 (1:55) Totnes. The Hebden Bridge of the South. I arrived on site. I met John. I went on stage. We talked for an hour about a passage to India. We came off. I went back to the station, got on a train and went home. But it was one of the best hours we've ever spent on a stage talking about a book. It was, it was. Brilliant. Electric and enlightening and... Speaker 5 (2:22) exactly the kind of thing you would think a literary podcast would not be capable of delivering. And I remember going home and thinking, man, that was good. That was a good one. And it stands up. Speaker 4 (2:36) Honestly, Speaker 5 (2:37) it stands up. It really stands up. It's great. Speaker 5 (2:41) Well, meanwhile, on the Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com forward slash backlisted, there's other delights happening. Speaker 2 (2:49) Yes, so that's where our subscribers are. Thank you very much, subscribers. You can hear our Booker Prize winning book show called Posh Bingo. Speaker 5 (2:58) We've won the Booker Prize. Speaker 2 (2:59) No, but did I say Booker Prize winning show? You said Booker Speaker 5 (3:02) Prize winning show. Booker Speaker 2 (3:04) Prize winning. show about booker prize winners there you go okay good Speaker 5 (3:09) we should though it should win the booker prize especially when one considers that the book on the next uh episode of posh bingo will be ian mccune's much mocked uh winner from 1998 amsterdam um i have read that before i don't know if nikki or john have i assumed john has just started reading it i've read it So we'll be talking about that with patrons on Monday, the 12th of October. And also we've got an episode of Batlisted Readers coming up. Nikki, what's that about? Speaker 2 (3:42) That's on Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. That's up now. It's up now. Yeah, you can go and have a listen to it. So yeah, otherwise we'll be back in two weeks with another repeat, which we're carrying on for a few more months. But as I said, if you want new content, head to patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Speaker 5 (4:02) Exciting. Enjoy the show, everyone. See you next time. Bye. Bye bye. Speaker 4 (4:28) Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the Barnes Cinema at Dartington Hall Estate in Devon. Dartington Hall is the place, as some of you might know, where the Labour Party Manifesto was written by Michael Young in 1945. And Speaker 6 (4:45) we're here today to talk about the novel A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. How many people here... in the Barnes Cinema and this wonderful audience, have read E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Wow. Everyone. Wow, that's incredible. Speaker 6 (5:04) Well, that's lucky. We don't need to do a plot recap for them. They're across it. We're very, very pleased to be joined on stage today by two guests. First of all, Alice Jolly. Alice is a novelist, a writer, memoirist, who has won both the Royal Society of Lipchitz V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for short stories and the Penn Ackley Prize for autobiography. Her novel, Mary Ann Sate Imbecile, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio in 2019, and in 2021 she was awarded an O. Henry Award. Her new volume of short stories, From Far Around They Saw Us Burn, was published in April, and this is her third appearance on an episode of Backlisted. She previously joined us for discussions of Shirley Hazard's novel The Great Fire, way back in 2016, on our seventh episode. and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier in episode 96. Speaker 6 (6:05) Welcome back. Speaker 1 (6:06) Thank you for asking me. Speaker 6 (6:08) Thank you. And we're also joined today by the novelist Patrick McCabe. Patrick is an author of novels, plays and short stories, who has won numerous awards and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Butcher Boy in 1992 and Breakfast on Pluto in 1998, both of which have been made into films. His most recent novel, Pog Mahone, was published in 2022, and his next novel, Golden Grove, is currently funding at Unbound and will be published soon. A well-known online encyclopedia categorizes him as follows, period, contemporary. Genre, black. Subject, Ireland. Literary movement, neo-delusional. Speaker 6 (7:06) Patrick, would you care to comment on that? I found it hard to locate the neo-delusional section in the bookshop. Speaker 3 (7:16) Delusional, I think, is probably the most accurate. From the get-go, any idea of reaching what it is you set out to achieve has always been, in my case, very delusional. Speaker 6 (7:27) On it goes. Patrick, this is the second occasion on which Patrick has joined us. He was with us to discuss the novel A Goat's Song by Dermot Healy. a couple of years ago on episode 140. So please, that's your panel for a discussion of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Speaker 6 (7:54) Patrick, it was your idea that we read and discuss A Passage to India. When did you first read this novel? Can you remember? Speaker 3 (8:05) Well... I came to the classics the way a lot of boys in the 60s did. There was a series of comic books called Classics Illustrated. And I read pretty much all of those. And Ivanhoe, you know, kidnapped all those things. And pretty much bluffed my way through life by pretending I'd read the real thick 600-page versions and nod sagely whenever anything was mentioned, but knew enough just to get by. And The Passage to India was one of those. But then recently I got a copy of it. Speaker 3 (8:43) Found myself say 70 or 80 pages through this is really hard going I found some of the very kind of torrid and then somewhere around the hundred page mark I found myself swimming in this extraordinary world that became curiously familiar to me, and I wasn't quite sure why that was. And then I began to realize that the language between Dr. Aziz and Cyril Fielding, the English teacher, was very similar to relationships that I'd overheard as a boy between, shall we say, members of the Anglo-Irish gentry and indigenous Irish farm workers, in that there was a great affection between said people, but there was also a subtext that you couldn't name. and Speaker 3 (9:38) I began to kind of get intrigued by the subtle way that Forster was dropping these things in, you know? Nothing overt, everything evasive, but still all the time this sense of abiding affection, but that at any time could come asunder. Speaker 3 (9:58) The cultural gaps. You see, the interesting thing about art is that everybody, it seems to me in any drama, everybody has their reasons. You know, Cyril Fielden thinks he's doing the right thing. So does Dr. Aziz. And that's all very well until things start to go wrong. And then on these, there's a phrase in, I think in Dubliners, where James Joyce, who was a metropolitan himself, talks about, crossing the dark mutinous Shannon waves. Like the metropolitan mind has this view that the rural mind is in some way unpredictable. Speaker 3 (10:41) distrust, untrustworthy, charming, but that can turn sour. The mutiny is buried in the language. If you're trained to the language of Fosse, you begin to see that there are little elliptical clues, that all is not as it seems. And then that becomes the great metaphor of the Marabar Caves. But ultimately, what really seduced me about the book was... its abandonment ultimately of social realism. There's a consistent kind of reference to the vaults of heaven, the stars, the sound of the universe, the pulsing. And after that, I was completely hooked. I think it's one of the greatest novels I've ever read. Great. We will come on to the Speaker 6 (11:24) third section of the novel and discuss some of the reasons why it may have come out that way. Alice, can I ask you, Many of us will have read Forster. I'm sure John can remember when he first read Forster. I know when I can. Can you? Speaker 1 (11:44) Yes, very much so. I read Forster as a teenager and I absolutely loved it. And I loved it so much that I thought, actually, I mustn't read all of these novels because then, you know, what am I going to be doing the rest of my life? And actually, by coincidence, before I knew I was going to be doing this, I had taken The Longest Journey down off the shelves because that's one I've never read. And I was suddenly thinking. actually, what am I hanging around for now? I mean, you know, I'm in my mid-50s. I might not have much longer for all we know. You know, I better finish off now all these things that I was saving up. So I think I'm going to be going back to Forster. But yeah, it was as a teenager. And I think it's really fascinating to think about, for me, how our understanding of the book has changed, but also how it has endured. We know it must be a very good novel because it It can be revisited by one generation after another and people can continue to find very different things in it. The things I absolutely did not see as a teenager. As a teenager, nobody was going to be told that Forster was gay. And we would barely have understood anything about that. And of course, we did know it was a colonial novel, but... that was just the British Empire and that was what it was and it wasn't discussed in a critical way really. So now reading it, the fact of Forster being gay seems very present and Patrick's already said that, you know, right at the centre of it is this friendship between Aziz and Fielding, which they both want to be a close friendship. But there's so much that divides them. And there are cultural things that divide them and spiritual things that divide them. I mean, the book is often about a clash between rationalism and a more spiritual way of thinking about the world. And Aziz is definitely a more spiritual person fielding more of a rational person. And that divides them. But it's deeply moving, I think, at the end of the book when they... they managed to reconnect in some way. They're never going to have the friendship or relationship they could have had. But it comes to the words of not now, not now. So Forster kind of knew that at some time these relationships would be possible. And I think as a teenager, I read that as when India has its independence, then this friendship will be possible because there'll no longer be that domination of one people by another. group of people. But also now I see it very much as Speaker 1 (14:28) Forster looking forward to the time when homosexuality would be legalized which of course didn't come until much later but I'm always deeply touched by Forster saying how angry he was with the establishment from the fact that homosexuality was illegal and how much of his time it had wasted and all the subterfuge that had been necessary because of this and I think I feel that deeply now in