DAMON Galgut’s new novel, Arctic Summer, is a poignant third-person reimagining of how, over the course of a languorous 12 years, E.M. Forster came to write his renowned reflection on racial tensions and philosophical questions at the time of the British Raj, A Passage to India (1924). Earlier works by Galgut, such as The Good Doctor (2003), which received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Africa Region, have gained him a reputation as a writer of evocative and empathetic fictions of the “new” South Africa, post-apartheid.

Later novels — In A Strange Room (2010) in particular, which shifts between Lesotho and India — have disturbed with their portraits of “tragically isolated” and impotent world travellers who seem to resemble their author in more than nationality and name. Arctic Summer is set predominantly in India and Egypt, with briefer sojourns in England, during the 20th century’s opening decades. It both continues a shift in narrative focus to locations further removed from South Africa, and marks a point of departure for the author towards a more historical and biographical mode of fiction-making.

The novel opens with the 33-year-old Forster (referred to throughout the narrative simply as “Morgan”) embarking on his first foray beyond European borders. It is the autumn of 1912 and the author is aboard an ocean liner bound for India, where he will stay with his “native” friend, Masood.

Galgut uses these initial pages quite succinctly to establish, on the one hand, his protagonist’s discomfort with the racism of the imperial types with whom he must travel (“it was the casual vileness, flung out in airy asides … that upset him most”), and, on the other, his dissatisfaction with the mundanities of an unsparkling East (“some of the Arabs were beautiful, but they had spoiled it by trying to sell him smutty postcards”). It is here also that Galgut alludes to another, painful tension in Morgan’s life: the sensitive man finds himself “alerted and alarmed,” “flushed and troubled,” by the homosexual indiscretions of a handsome officer, Searight, who is returning to Peshawar. The latter’s tales of foreign promiscuity haunt the unworldly writer, while his rumoured seduction of an Indian passenger stirs Morgan intellectually as well as physically.

The twin emotions of attraction and repulsion, prostration and rejection, and a persistent yearning on Morgan’s part “only” to “connect” master with servant, Englishman with Indian (the full realisation of which venture is repeatedly thwarted), animate and stall the chapters that follow. These cover, in the main, Morgan’s friendship with the insouciant Masood, to whom he is engaged as tutor during the young Indian’s time at Oxford. This is a relationship based on a mutual but pathetically unequal affection which results, on one particularly finely conjured lamp-lit Bankipore night, in Morgan’s anguished, solitary suppression of his unsatisfied desires, “hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness.” Yet it is Masood who insists that, because of Morgan’s “Oriental sensibility,” India, and not Italy, will be the subject of the writer’s most “unique novel.” This is a casual fancy, perhaps, but one which, as the couple’s connection stagnates and mutates, Galgut’s protagonist spends another 12 years (and the remainder of his book) struggling to realise, both consciously and subconsciously.

Perhaps the most moving relationship delineated, however, is not the great, agonising Indian affair, but the smaller, shabbier and more tentative one Morgan stumbles upon with the young Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed, whom he meets when stationed with the Red Cross search unit in war-time Alexandria. Shy formality, confusion and tenderness characterise the moments they spend together on the trams, in the Municipal Gardens, and — eventually — in Mohammed’s modest “home of comfortable loneliness.” Galgut is particularly adept at conveying Morgan’s somewhat naive delight and Mohammed’s dignified defensiveness as they form a fragile bond which transgresses class divisions, in addition to racial categories and sexual norms.

The narrative pace lags at times, for example, as Galgut describes Morgan’s periods of torpor and mounting sexual frustration when he returns to India as private secretary at the court of the youthful Maharaja Bapu Sahib. It is in this section of the novel that Galgut also attempts to convey the author’s philosophical fascination with what he perceives as the ‘magic’, ‘mystery’ and ‘opacity’ of India, and the contribution to A Passage to India’s evolution of being in a place where “things were not rounded off and resolved.” But the overwhelming obsession in this part is the increasingly strained Morgan’s unpleasant and unsatisfactory relationship with Kanaya, a bragging little barber who is instructed to serve him at the Maharaja’s crumbling court. These passages may mimic the “stuck” writer’s actual lethargy and accurately reflect his (sexual) preoccupations at this particular point in his life, but they seem particularly laboured; one wonders to what extent Galgut’s personal preoccupations may distort Morgan’s here.

Galgut emphasises in the novel’s endpapers that Arctic Summer is “seeded” with quotes from Forster’s novel and “actual dialogue” from his diaries and letters. These encourage credulity in the reader, and it is delightful to imagine the scenes where Forster converses with such period figures as Edward Carpenter and Virginia Woolf, or is haunted by the “hollowness” of the Barabar caves, to be authentic. But the weight of Galgut’s biographical research — and our consciousness of it as readers — could also be a problem. For, what is Arctic Summer? It is offered to us as a fictive exploration of a life. Yet it inspires not only a fascination with Galgut’s central character, it also initiates a nagging urge to compare his fictional representation of the author with the recorded facts: to disentangle the contemporary writer’s imaginative projections from Morgan’s thoughts in the hope of comprehending more clearly how (far) the Edwardian author’s ambiguous imperial perspectives, proclivities, and compulsions came to shape his remarkable last novel, and of understanding more fully the artistic license Galgut takes, as well as the extent of his ingenuity.

Towards the end of Arctic Summer, Morgan (now well-known as the author of the acclaimed and admonished A Passage to India) is taking tea at a coffee house in the Strand. On preparing to leave he overhears the two women talking, one of whom recognises him in his awkwardness and sartorial inelegance. It is reported that “She said … distinctly, ‘I have heard that his life is unhappy … he hasn’t really lived at all, except in his mind’.” The narrative proceeds:

“The subject of this discussion caught sight of himself now … in a gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall: a curious, contorted figure … That isn’t me, he thought … Everything about this man was wrong. But the reflection would never show the truth, which he wanted to shout aloud. Do you know what I have made, he would ask them … But standing before the two ladies … he was suddenly at a loss … ‘I have loved,’ he told them. That is, I mean to say, lived. In my own way.”

This is one of the most touching insights Arctic Summer provides into Forster’s agonised perceptions of himself and his achievements. Yet it occurs in a book based on fragments of biographical material which Galgut elsewhere describes as “frustratingly opaque” on the two areas of “physical intimacy and writing” which form his novel’s central thematic focus. Readers may struggle to reconcile what they can appreciate of Galgut’s “fiction” with what it may or may not reveal about the “real” Forster’s life, as they navigate the brittle landscapes of Arctic Summer.

The reviewer has a PhD in contemporary South Asian Literature in English from the University of East London

Arctic Summer

(NOVEL)

By Damon Galgut

Atlantic Books, UK

ISBN 9780857897183

368pp.