Arctic Summer

★★★★★ Damon Galgut (Umuzi, R250)

ON December 19 1910, a few months after the publication of Howards

End, EM Forster began sketching out a new novel. He never completed it, though he did come up with a title,

Arctic Summer, which he defined as “the long cold day in which there is time to do things”.

In his novel of the same name, Damon Galgut reconstructs the Arctic summer of Forster’s long fictional silence, which lasted from 1910 until A

Passage to India in 1924. Apparently unable to write, or at any rate finish a book, Forster did indeed have “time to do things” — chiefly travel — and the period of exploration was crucial to his work and his character.

Galgut’s novel opens with Forster’s first passage to India in 1912, undertaken principally to see Syed Ross Masood, with whom he had fallen in love. Masood was in fact heterosexual, thus frustrating Forster’s erotic yearnings. On board ship, Forster becomes acquainted with a louche British officer who informs him that India is a land of homosexual opportunity, but the timid novelist returns to England six months later, still a virgin at 34.

Galgut has so seamlessly incorporated Forster’s diaries, letters and novels into his narrative that it is often hard to tell which novelist is which. The book is frequently very moving, but the question arises: what made Galgut write a novel so closely based on readily available biographical facts? It seems at first glance a curious side-swerve after the exhilaratingly opaque In a Strange Room. In fact the two books are complementary: stories of men who find themselves adrift in life, go travelling, and become involved in a series of equivocal, frustrating and unsettling relationships.

At one point in Arctic Summer, Galgut has Forster reflect that “fiction is too artificial and selfconscious ever to convey anything real”, but this is an example of the book’s enjoyable slyness. As Forster’s own fiction shows, the imagination can transform mere facts into something universally real and true. The pain of unequal love and the desolating gulf between desire and fulfilment, so beautifully conveyed here by Galgut, is as recognisable today as it was over a century ago. — Peter Parker @TelegraphBooks