ABSTRACT
A truly great novel is a tale to the simple, a parable to the wise, and a direct revelation of reality to the man who has made it part of his being': so Middleton Murry, in a piece called 'The Breakup of the Novel' which was published in 1924, the year of A Passage to India. A story, a parable, and at the same time an intuited truth, an image: anything less, it appeared, was only a bundle of fragments. Like the birth of the god, the novel is contrived as a direct revelation of reality, of meaning conferred by a unifying and thought-excluding love; as, leaving gods out of it, the one orderly product. The 'one orderly product' can include life entire; good and evil, privation and plenitude, muddle and mystery: seen, for a moment, whole.
