A Passage to India Is a Book About . . . .

*If you haven't finished the novel and don't want to know what happens, for the love of Pete, don't read this!*

When I finish a novel, I find it useful to complete the sentence, "This is a book about . . ." I am having a very hard time doing that with this novel.

This is, in its broadest sense, a book about "British India," although in those terms, Gone with the Wind is a book about the American Civil War, and that tells us nothing.

This is book about cultures crashing together, whirling with many arms like a "mythical monster," and tumbling into the water - again, yes and no, for I would never read a book based on that description; it is a description, but not the story itself.

So what in the hell is this a story about? Of the three sections of the book, only one has a clear, driving plot, and despite this, A Passage to India is clearly not a he-said, she-said story about an "insult" in a cave.

Now that I have finished, I think this must be a story about a doomed relationship between Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz, two men who cannot be friends in their time and place because politics and power prevent any truly mutual connection between them. For a time, during the "Caves" section, they are almost friends, both of them banding together against the English, who are in turn banding together against them, but Fielding and Aziz cannot remain friends. Fielding's sympathy for Miss Quested breaks them apart, and by the time Fielding returns, he has changed, as the men in the very first chapter predicted he would. (Aziz changes, too - at least in his rhetoric.)

This book is more than that story, too, of course, but one needs a way to pin it down, at least to start.