RETRO READS

VAL HENNESSY

A PASSAGE TO INDIA

by E. M. Forster

(Penguin £8)

All the glorious, teeming vibrancy of Anglo- India is indelibly depicted in Forster’s marvellous novel — the crowds, colours, festivals, tonga wallahs, bubbling hookahs, dust, pong of burning cow dung and the fragrances of flowers and spices.

Here, too, is the exclusive, security- gated oasis of neat bungalows and lawns of the colonial Brits with their supercilious attitudes towards the ‘natives’.

As one ghastly English memsahib says: ‘The kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die . . . they give me the creeps.’

Into this cauldron of clashing cultures arrives priggish Miss Quested to marry fiancé Ronny. She and her elderly chaperone, Mrs Moore, meet the impulsive, eager-to-please Dr Aziz, who arranges a visit to the Marabar Caves.

During the trip, Miss Quested has some sort of hysterical panic, which results in Dr Aziz facing a trial. This is a thrilling story, with many profound observations about human nature.

THE VIENNA MELODY

by Ernest Lothar

(Europa £10)

IT IS 1889 Vienna. A world-famous piano-maker leaves a will, specifying that his heirs, if they are to receive their inheritance, must live together in the palatial family home.

The house is rapidly converted into luxury apartments, where gripping incidents in the lives of three successive generations unfold: feuds, betrayals, illegitimate offspring, seething passions, love affairs, a secret fling with the Crown Prince, world war and the rise of Nazism.

In fact, this is like the Forsyte Saga on the Danube, and it is fiendishly addictive. ‘Grown-ups can make catastrophic mistakes,’ screeches an aristocratic aunt when a nephew marries a Jewish beauty. Mistakes are plenty as fortunes decline, along with the shimmering, glorious beauty of dignified, pre-war Vienna, with its chestnut avenues, violet meadows and lilac-lined boulevards.

All would soon be polluted when Hitler and his goose- stepping goons marched into town.