[I’m reading this 2014 novel in four sections, and so far I have read one. I write about each section as I read, so I never know what is coming next. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the novel as I read it.]
14 February 2026
I’ve recently read a couple of novels based on real historical figures, and neither of them came close to this. Galgut doesn’t keep reminding us about when and where we are, because he’s embedded in the consciousness of one man, Morgan, in his early 30s in 1912 and on a ship to India. If we didn’t already know, we soon realise this is E M Forster, always known by his middle name, and really, really shy. No, not shy, it’s deeper than that. He can hold his own in social situations, had made genuine and long-lasting friendships at Cambridge, and… he has no faith in his own qualities. He has already published four novels, including A Room with a View which made his reputation and Howards End that sealed it—and he still doesn’t believe himself to be a writer. He’s already told at least one friend that he will never write another novel. As these chapters go on, we realise that he feels he is forced to write about what he doesn’t know. Heterosexual love and marriage? The only woman he really knows is his cold-seeming, ever critical mother.
Everybody knows he did write at least one more novel, based on the very trip he’s embarked on now. But maybe not everybody knows that after A Passage to India, whilst his reputation never faltered, he didn’t sustain it through writing fiction. Instead, he became perhaps the most respected man of letters in England… but that’s long after the timeline of this novel. What’s interesting now is how Galgut is able to lead us to think that Forster’s near-pathological lack of self-belief, and his (so far) lifelong shame about his own sexuality are part and parcel of the same mindset. By the time we’ve read this far, we know that he has been able to voice his sexual feelings, almost frankly, to the first man he has truly fallen in love with. But, after the man seems to make it clear that it’s reciprocal, he also tells him he fully intends to do the expected thing and marry. This thread, in the chapter bearing the man’s name as its title, is also embedded in what is clearly going to be the novel’s other main theme, later fully explored in A Passage to India. Can an Englishman and an Indian ever truly know one another?
The title of Chapter 2 is Masood, the name of the Indian Muslim Forster met when he tutored him in Latin for a few months. But Galgut doesn’t start his novel there, because as Chapter 1 opens it’s some years later and we’re on that ship. And yes, he tells an Englishman he’s met on board, he is going to meet an Indian friend… but that’s all we know for now, because Galgut fills in the background details only when we need to catch up. In this short Chapter 1, the focus is a self-assured army officer, who doesn’t hesitate for a moment to make a pass at his new acquaintance. Forster is a little taken aback, and pretends not to understand, but Searight, the officer who gives the chapter its title, takes this in his confident stride.
Forster is with three Cambridge friends, going to India for different reasons, and all very comfortable in one another’s company. Are there any others among them in the same ‘minority’, as Forster calls it, that he is? Searight has a pretty secure radar, but these are middle-class Englishmen, and no more ready for his kind of adventure than Forster. Is it in this chapter that we first learn of Forster’s deep attachment to one of them when at Cambridge? It’s reciprocated, like his love for Masood but, as Masood plans to do, the friend marries. Forster isn’t good with women, despite the praise heaped on him for his portrayal of female characters, and he finds the new wife impossible to relate to. But that’s in the past and, now the ship is within sight of India, it’s time for Galgud to backtrack…
…because at the start of Chapter 2, Forster is back from Cambridge and living with his mother. His existence, from which Cambridge was apparently only a temporary respite, is stiflingly suburban and stiflingly female. Respectable old and middle-aged ladies fill his afternoons…. Galgut doesn’t suggest that his writing is a means of escape, but the arrival of the seventeen-year-old Masood is more than welcome. He is as outgoing as Forster isn’t, privately educated in India in the best public-school tradition and with all the confidence and sense of self-worth that that such an upbringing often brings. Forster is charmed by everything about him, including his very un-English way of expressing his inner thoughts and feelings. He’s the opposite of Forster in this too, speaking in a way that seems frankly exaggerated and overwrought to a shy Englishman.
But, quite quickly, Forster realises that this at least is merely a difference in conventional expectations. Masood, especially once he is at Oxford, takes to mocking the English way of hiding their true meaning under immovable strata of correct manners. Forster is enchanted by the possibilities of something different from the life of grey monotony he can imagine before him. Is it just a crush? Maybe that’s a part of it—it isn’t the first time that Forster has become love-struck by a charming and intelligent friend—but in Galgut’s presentation of it, there’s more to it than that. Many years later, when he finally decides that yes, he can leave his mother with her friend in Italy and travel to India on his own, he isn’t following a sad little infatuation. It’s India he wants to understand.
Am I jumping the gun? Does it matter? Galgut is presenting us with a Bildungsroman for a late developer and, inevitably, he has chosen to make this physical journey to India a part of that. It’s no accident that the voyage is given that colourful added dimension through the presence of Searight. Here is an Englishman who, he frankly tells Forster, has been able to blossom sexually in India. According to the mores of our own times, Searight is a disgusting seducer of boys as well as men. And in Chapter 1 he doesn’t offer any kind of model for Forster and his Cambridge circle. They are slightly bemused by him, and he is given no status beyond that of an exotic vision of what is possible.
Because if this really is a Bildungsroman, it’s an emotional one rather than intellectual. Searight, in fact, was a real-life soldier who developed a well-respected expertise in language and linguistics, but you wouldn’t know that from what we see of him here. Which is true of most of the novel. Forster’s literary achievements are described in terms of their success and their reception by his friends, not for any rigorous commentary they might offer on a stifling and class-bound English society. Which is fine. Galgut doesn’t need to cover that, because what he’s interested in is the plight of a man trapped in a rigid and unforgiving society—and how he might come to terms with that.
This is what Chapter 2, much longer than Chapter 1, is really about. It accounts for that sense we have of being inside Forster’s consciousness, where everything in his life, and his own post-Victorian sense of morality, is telling him he ought to be feeling terrible guilt. Which he does, only very rarely finding even the remotest possibility of sexual and emotional fulfilment. He has a marvellously successful time at Cambridge in every respect but this one, and the one near-sexual relationship he is able to forge is based on a classicist’s appreciation of Ancient Greek sexual mores. His friend H O Meredith (always ‘Hom’) will embrace him, even lie close and caress him—and that’s as far as it ever goes. Meredith isn’t ashamed of whatever feelings either of them might have, but is determined to deny them any outlet. The fact that his marriage is a failure is unsurprising, and Galgut doesn’t make a big thing of it. He does return to Meredith later, as unfulfilled as Forster but, perhaps, not as curious.
There is another near-miss—Forster is already in his 20s—when he gets a letter from a former acquaintance at Cambridge, Malcolm Darling. He is, or is about to be married, Forster is his usual awkward self in the fiancée’s presence… and, one evening, it doesn’t matter. Malcolm has brought a friend of his, another Kingsman called Merz, and they all have a hilarious time. On the way to the station Forster and Merz find themselves walking together. The conversation is textbook, non-specific chat about Malcolm’s marriage and their own slim prospects. Forster makes it clear he has no intentions of ever marrying, says no more than that, and doesn’t really answer when Merz asks him if he’s lonely. So far, so predictable—and it remains so until they part. But next day, Malcolm tells him the bad news. Merz had gone home and hanged himself. Did Forster have any inkling of Merz’s mood? He tells Malcolm, because how on earth could he say anything else, that the conversation seemed ‘normal’. In a way, he’s not lying.
But this is all back-story, to show us the stage Forster is at when Masood comes along. The whole arc of their story tends towards the inevitable—Forster’s understanding that his friend’s expansiveness and frankness is not at all what it would mean if shown by an Englishman. Yes, Masood says, he loves his English friend, and they spend a lot of time together. Yes, when Forster makes it as clear as he can that his own love goes far beyond mere friendship, he seems to understand completely. But, like Meredith in many ways—but far more painfully this time—he stops it going any further. Forster worries that he might have alienated Masood, but he hasn’t… which doesn’t help him at all. They still spend time and go on trips together, and perhaps their friendship seems to be as firm as ever when Masood returns to India, but Forster is left wondering what on earth is possible for a gay man in 1912. Searight’s way? Not his style at all. Meredith’s Greek fantasy? Nope.
So… what?
We can read it for you wholesale 