#7 A Passage To India by E.M.Forster

What happened to Adela Quested in the Marabar Caves?

That is the question at the heart of E.M. Forster's novel about the fragility of Anglo-Indian relationships and racial tension in colonial India. After a mysterious event during a visit to the Marabar Caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Miss Quested, a naive young woman recently arrived from England. As the trial begins, the darker side of colonialism is exposed. This is not the India of white linen suits, gin and tonics and polo but an India of simmering resentment, countless cultural misunderstandings and, of course, breath-taking racism.

It's hard to say whether I liked this book or not. Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century fiction, it's a bit heavy going (lots of description, lots of talking about feelings etc) so not really a book for the breakfast table. However when I did settle down to it, I did get absorbed in it. I wanted to find out how it all would end. I was a bit disappointed though. You never do find out what happened in the Caves of Marabar but I suppose that isn't the tale that Forster had to tell. It wasn't even all about colonialism. At the book's very core is Forster's dissection of the human character itself. His characters are not heroic. They are bigoted, naive, repressed, selfish and as the trail continues, both Indians and the English become bitter and resentful.

In Forster's own words A Passage to India is "about something wider than politics... about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and in the Indian sky". And that is exactly what you get; a sprawling novel that explores not only the fragile and dangerous realities of colonialism but tries to pin down the very nature of India and the people within it.

#6 Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Written in 1958, Our Man in Havana is a secret service comedy based on Greene's own stint with MI6 in West Africa. Set against the absurdities of the Cold War, it tells the blackly comic tale of Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman recruited into the Secret Service. Needing money but having no real information to offer, Wormold lets his imagination run wild, claiming expenses for fictional agents and sending false drawings of non-existent secret installations (based on parts of a dismantled vacuum cleaner!). However Wormold's scheme unravels with darkly humorous consequences when MI6 and other agencies start taking his activities seriously. Our Man in Havana was originally intended as a screenplay but permission was denied from the censors, who stuffily informed him that any play poking fun at the work of the Secret Service was damn unpatriotic.

Like his other, earlier comedies and thrillers, Our Man in Havana always took second place in Green's own mind to his later 'catholic' novels. That's probably true. While Our Man in Havana was good, blackly comic in places and an enjoyable read, it wasn't especially memorable. Our Man in Havana is the only Greene novel I'd read so far but my Dad, who went through a Graham Greene phase when he was in sixth form, reliably informs me that his other novels have a much greater impact.

Read On Other novels by Greene include The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Human Factor