At one level, you know this story already if you’re one of those people who has been following the Forster saga which is now bidding fair to become the Forster industry. You know that Forster was gay and that he never did allude to it in his novels, but that he and Virginia Woolf could spend entire afternoons talking about Sapphism until, the latter records somewhere in her diaries, they were sick of the subject. You know also that Forster wrote his own gay porn, sprightly stories, he calls them, and burned them and then regretted their loss. You know that Maurice, which is the weakest of his novels, was written early, published last and was a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
If you have been following the genre which turns writers into characters of fiction—Colm Toibin’s The Master is one example, The Hours by Michael Cunningham—you will know that the best characters are those whose lives are beginning to splinter into pieces, even as they produce their finest work. In The Hours, we always know that Virginia Woolf is headed towards that last walk into the water. And Henry James must face the contumely of knowing that his play has fallen apart to booing and hissing from the audience—his play—while Oscar Wilde’s which opened on the same night—has been a magnificent success. And we know as we read that very soon, things will be reversed again. Wilde, indiscreet Wilde, wild Wilde, the Wilde who tried it on with James and was repulsed, that Wilde is headed for martyrdom at the hands of the British legal system and James, stitched up James, careful James, lapidary James, will live out his old age and will die of cancer, after writing to Henry Adams: “I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.”
What we know of these characters then is also a player in these novels. It’s like watching Shakespeare in Love and enjoying how much Shakespeare one knows. One congratulates oneself on one’s literary knowledge. This means of course that anyone who chooses to put Edward Morgan Forster into a novel must be sure of himself, must make sure every figure tallies and every scene only connects with something in the canon, the oeuvre, the diaries, the notes. I confess that I read this book like a lazy reviewer. I did not stop to check whether Syed Ross Masood would have been a head taller than the people around him in Paris. I could I suppose have checked how tall the grandson of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was, what the average height of the French was and then tallied this. But I was enjoying myself too much to bother. I excused myself on the grounds that I was reading a novel and that if I ever needed to find out something about Forster I would check the Furbank or the Moffatt and make sure of my facts.
So what am I saying? I don’t know if Damon Galgut got it all right. I don’t particularly care. I didn’t read The Hours that way or The Master that way and I’m not about to start now. I read it as a novel and it held as a novel, a beautiful book about a beautiful man in love with an ordinary man—how often this happens but what’s love got to do with, what’s love but a second-hand emotion?—and it worked. I didn’t particularly pay attention to India-as-backdrop because I don’t care about backdrops. Novels are about people and people in novels are about their interior lives. (If a person is about his body, it’s genre writing or porn.) And at the end of Arctic Summer, you’re sad, so sad for Forster, but you’re light and floating because this will not be the end. It never is. The seasons change, even Arctic summers. But, as Forster himself wrote: “It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”