Passage to India - rambling thoughts

So I need to write a book review for E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, which I just finished reading today.  It ought to be an easy assignment, but I hadn't been counting on this being a hard book to review.  It's about a whole SLEW of topics, and I feel inclined to take it every direction possible, which cancels out any one, focused direction.

For example.  It makes references to several major social topics, plus a rather uneven portrayal of three religions (Christianity getting the most negativity and least credence, of course), on top of a lot of mystery and weird goings on and paragraphs that are either philosophical wonders or horribly contrived rhetoric.  Set in India.  I guess what I wonder is how Forster, a Brit, can really give an Indian's perspective of the British Empire in India, but then, I don't know if that was his intent.  I get the impression that the character of Fielding is a Gary Stu, but the prose itself doesn't limit itself to his perspective.  Oh, and the whole "caves" incident is either much worse or much sillier than written, and I seriously doubt Mrs. Moore would have been portrayed as she is if the book had been written by a woman.  My personal opinion is that characters of the opposite gender ought to be heavily based on real people...well, maybe Mrs. Moore was based on a real person, but I'd have to look it up to feel sure.

Anywho, I'm determined (as is often the case) to write my review before I read other people's.  A huge loathing of mine is to write a review and feel someone else's opinions breathing down my collar.  So tomorrow (today I just figured out Chicago formatting) I'll write up the skeleton of my review, and then find out if anybody else on the internet understands this book better. 

The most lasting impression it left is the characters' sense of pessimism.  There was a lot of doom and gloom, and it was chiefly of the characters' own doings.  Nobody seemed to end up in a better place in life, all because of decisions they made that, rather than being dramatically terrible, were just plain old mediocre.  I admit I haven't read many books like that.  It's hardly inspirational.

Also, none of the characters lived up to their full potential, for good or evil.  This is pretty realistic, I think, but if we're talking fiction, it doesn't hurt to have a few strong characters.  Good characters have something to live for and to die for, preferably greater than themselves.  The characters in A Passage to India struck me as sort of existentialist, without the rebellious streak that you find in Kafka's characters. 

Tomorrow I will do some more research on Forster; that ought to (hopefully) give me some hints about the point of this book.