Arctic Summer

Talented South African writer Galgut (The Good Doctor) returns with a well- researched if occasionally leaden novel about E.M. Forster. Set mostly between Forster’s first trip to India in 1912, during which he visits the caves that play so great a role in A Passage to India, and the 1924 publication of that classic, the novel explores Forster’s intense, sexually tinged friendships with an Indian lawyer, Syed Ross Masood, to whom he dedicated Passage, and the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl. Galgut chronicles Forster’s struggle to complete his “Indian novel” and his “invisible, double life” as a homosexual. The avidity of what were then termed Morgan’s “minorite” desires are effectively conveyed, as is the timidity that often frustrates them; Morgan is 37 when he loses his virginity to a British soldier in Alexandria. Unfortunately, some hammy descriptions of Forster at work weigh on the prose (“In one moment, as if lit up by lightning, he had seen the whole arc of events”), and the cameos made by the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and a fulminating D.H. Lawrence seem perfunctory. Any flatness stands out: the cost of fictionalizing a great writer. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Sept.)