(4 of 5)
Yet symbolically it meant everything to him. For in his view the universe was a hopeless "muddle," and India, in its vastness and variety, was the dangerous and seductive symbol of that universe. Finally, the echo, with its capacity to undermine one's hold on reason, to reduce everything, the good and the bad, to the same level of meaninglessness, symbolized India. The echo, in the novel, speaks thus: " 'Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.' If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same—'ou-boum.' "
Only two characters understand the dreadful disorienting power made manifest by the echo, and their answer to it is withdrawal from the world. One is a Hindu sage, Professor Godbole, a lively cricket of a man, hopping to some music only the brilliant Alec Guinness can hear. As Fielding busies himself with Aziz's defense, Godbole's comment is merely "You can do what you like, but the outcome will be the same." The other is Mrs. Moore, Adela's traveling companion, almost comically regal at some moments, uncannily vulnerable in others, but always touched by mystery as Peggy Ashcroft delicately plays her. Mrs. Moore enters only one cave, then reels out of it, having confronted her own mortality. Later, when people try to draw her back into the muddle to testify at Aziz's trial, she escapes by booking passage home: "Love in a church, love in a cave, as if there is the least difference, and I held up from my business over such trifles. Nothing I say or do will make the slightest difference."
Mrs. Moore and Godbole are the last of the film's matched pairs, and narratively the least important of them. But it is in their almost haughty indifference to the mundane and reasonable that the story's meaning is vested. And it is in them that Lean's art reaches its subtlest heights. They scarcely exchange a word, but they silently signal to each other from cut to cut, across vales of karma, achieving a communion that none of the other characters, for all their talk, ever do. In a way, they could be said to resonate to each other, echo each other.
Echoes, echoes. The critic Lionel Trilling described the novel as "a book which is contrived of echoes." The movie, if it were to achieve the kind of spiritual, as opposed to literal, faithfulness to its source that Lean aspired to, had to be a thing of echoes too—but visual, not auditory, echoes. Image reverberates to image endlessly in this film. The early shots of the great arch and the little train lost in the huge landscape propose the film's overarching theme—India as mysterious and maddening cavern—and then Lean starts the echoes rolling through it. When Mrs. Moore meets Aziz for the first time, the moon is reflected cool and tiny in a shimmering pool. It does not appear again until she has heard the fateful voice of the caves. Then, suddenly, it looms large over the shoulder of a forbidding monolith, itself reminiscent of a moonscape.