ARCTIC SUMMER

In this literary tour de
force, twice Booker shortlisted novelist Damon Galgut evokes the life and
work of E.M. Forster, his travels to India and the freedom and inspiration he
found there ‘There are traces of J.M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut
is a true original’ – Geoff Dyer ‘Galgut is an outstanding writer: His prose
is acute, beautiful, unsettling. I have rarely felt so moved whilst reading’
– The TimesE.M. Forster, one of the most iconic writers of our time, lived
when the British Empire was at its height. His last and greatest novel, a
passage to India, was written over a period of eleven years and for nine of
those years he was stuck, unable to move forward. A powerful personal story
lies behind the writing, which comes to life for the first time in Arctic
Summer. In 1906, Forster, who was already starting to make a name for himself
as one of England’s most promising writers, met Syed Ross Masood, a young
Indian who had come to his country to study law. It was the start of a lifelong
friendship that was also, on Forster’s side, a deep, unrequited love.
Desperately repressed, living in the shadow of his mother, he was unable to
act on his most intimate feelings. When Masood returned to India in 1912,
Forster followed him and it was on this journey, travelling through much of
the country when it was still under British rule, that the first seeds of his
novel were planted. He started writing it in 1913, when he got back to
England but his creative impulse was soon blocked. He was only able to
complete it in 1924, after he had gone back to India again, this time as the
Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Between these two journeys lay
much turmoil and passion, the writing of his unpublishable homosexual novel,
his friendship with other writers like Virginia Woolf and C.P. Cavafy, the
outbreak of the First World War and a long stay in Alexandria, where he found
unlikely fulfilment with an Egyptian tram conductor. Meticulously researched
and vividly imagined, Arctic Summer conjures the figure of Forster, in all
his sensitive, contradictory genius, as he struggled to write his
masterpiece.