Never Trust an English Woman: On Passage to India

Okay today we're talking about EM Forster's A Passage to India. It is a classic of modernist era British literature, but I think it's something like a secondary or tertiary classic. I only say that because in undergraduate and then graduate school reading specifically in that period was never assigned as a text. I think there may be a couple reasons for this. The first is that it was released in 1924 and even though it was released two years after Ulysses it has a feeling it's a little bit more Edwardian or late Victorian. I can't really pinpoint exactly why I say that, but I think it lacks a bit of an interiority of the characters. It's more pulled back high levels you don't get them their inner life as much. I think the other reason it might not be a full canon material is that it takes place in India. There seems to be some sort of reluctance to include these texts that are part of the diaspora, the empire writ large if it's not overly critical of the Empire. I don't know if this is some post-colonial canonization lack.

 

The thing is it's a surprisingly delightful book. It's hard to read but it's hard to read in the way that it is like Richard Wright's Native Son is hard to read -- it's hard to read that there's great Injustice in  those Clash of civilizations. India is tricky to understand anyway because right now it is one of the largest Muslim countries if you just take an absolute count of all the people in the nation that are Muslim. I think it has the second highest after Indonesia. But India itself is so big that they're only 18 or 20% of the total population now. And prior to British colonization there was a huge Clash because the minority Muslim Mughals had been in charge for a while. And then you have a very rigid caste system in the Hindu side of the Indian subcontinent that I'm not even well-versed enough to speak about. 

 

So, you have this entire mélange of the height of the British Raj, you have Muslim Indian and Hindu Indians all together and the basic plot is one of a big misunderstanding. You're reading and you get this dramatic irony that hovers over the key plot event in the second half is kind of this unraveling. Spoiler alert: there is an assault or an attempted rape it's not clear that an English woman accuses an Indian of partaking. But the thing is we see the scene from the accused’s perspective, and we know that the fact of the matter is that she's making it up. And the entire middle of the book you're reading is this character who I really like just is getting railroaded. I don't want to get too deep into it but thankfully it's not too much Injustice just enough to know that hey colonialism is bad. 

 

The only thing that I really could talk against this book is that there is an entire third section that seems a little superfluous after the events and I'm sure there's criticism on it if you wanted to pull apart about why it matters and why it's necessary to the text but as a reader my first real Forester it just didn't really seem like it was necessary overall. I really enjoyed it and I would recommend reading A Passage to India if you were a fan of fiction about colonialism. 

 

Vaccine Pledge 2021

Took my medicine like a good boy. 

On China Mieville's "The City and The City"

 

Today I'm looking at the City and the City by China Mieville. This is a science fiction book that came out a little over a decade ago. I want to like this author's works mainly because he's a comrade. I first read him a couple of years back when he did that version of the Russian Revolution called October. It was a historical novel that was like Ten Days that Shook the world but was better than Ten Days that Shook the World. Since then, I've read a couple of his books, This Census Taker and Three Moments of an explosion and Neither were particularly memorable.

 

 This book is a New York Times bestseller and one that you go to and it's supposed to be one of his better ones. If you read the blurbs and just try to get a sense of what's that about you really might not know. The basic premise is that there are two cities that exist independently but in the same geographical space. The people who live in those cities are trained from their youth to ignore what's going on right next to him if they get the signals and the cues that it is from one of them the other City. The thing is that it just didn't really work for me. It was about page 74 and I realized that I was getting most of the World building for this aspect that I was going to get as a reader. I just said I don't believe it. Now here's the thing, everything else is good enough that despite me not believing the world building and the central premise I still want to keep reading. 

 

There's a murder mystery and that very Central thing plays huge role in it. What it really got me thinking was what this two-city thing really represented. Was it some geographical political commentary, which I think is a reading that is the end of the easiest to do because it seems like it's right there for analysis? There's also the possibility that isn't there a bigger metaphysical thing. I kept asking myself  are these people already dead are they in purgatory I don't know. The problem with that is there are  people that come in from outside and visit the cities. And then they leave again so that might not be the best reading. Overall, I did read it and I enjoyed it, but I just tried really had to not think about that central thing of the setting because the minute I started thinking of the central premise it didn't work so just kind of was that thing if you ignore the man behind the curtain it's okay but like that curtain just really lamp shaded.