Reason read: BAC, LT
This is the second of 7 novels by the author. I've read 5 of his novels counting this one. It is a story of a young man who has a deformed foot and he is picked on by other boys in the private school. He attends college and studies philosophy and would like to be a writer. His parents divorce and die and he becomes an orphan at 15. Things are good until he marries and then his life is ruined compared to his life before with his male friends. This is not the best novel by the author and therefore it is less known. Rating 2.4

E.M. Forster is always a fascinating read. Writing at the height of the British Empire, he tells stories about conventional people which nevertheless manage to convey strong anti-colonialist sentiments. Despite the lack of any overseas travel, this novel upholds this tradition. Forster tells stories of people who learn that the idea of "Britishness," along with the Empire itself, is a lie that fails to withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny. From an upper-middle class family himself, it is perhaps his sexuality, which had to kept a secret for most of his life, that allows him to see the shortcomings of his own class so clearly.

The story centers on Rickie, who is a Cambridge student at the start of the novel, who has recently lost both his father and his mother. The two key words in this book are "conventional" and "unconventional" - his parents were unconventional in that they lived apart for all the years that he knew them. His father was lame (Forster's word) and an unpleasant personality to boot, while his mother was kind and had a kind of transformative inner power. Rickie, who is lame like his father, dreams of doing great things along with his peers, but does poorly in his exams and leaves Cambridge with no firm plans other than to write. His stories explore the intersection of conventional people with 'nature,' which is the anchor of the narrative. He falls in love and marries a conventional woman (who considers herself unconventional, but she is soon shown to be otherwise) and starts working with her equally conventional brother at a secondary school, turning conventional children out into the world.

On the side of unconventionality, or nature, Rickie and his wife discover that he has a half-brother, Stephen. Stephen lives with Rickie's aunt and is wild, impulsive, self-centered - but also honest and handsome and capable. Stephen has been raised as a kind of half-gentleman with an understanding of the classics, but he works as a shepherd because he enjoys it, and is deeply attached to the land. Importantly, Stephen and Rickie's aunt live in Wiltshire, the site of Stonehenge and other pagan sites which play a critical role in the action. Stephen harks back to this pagan life - by growing up amongst these ruins, but also through his blood line and the manner of his parenthood (very unconventional).

The action centers on their discovery that Stephen is related to Rickie and the decisions they make to keep this a secret (conventional!!). These decisions eat away at Rickie and turn him from being fully and truly himself. In Forster's world it's unclear whether Rickie could actually survive in either camp - the conventional life is sapping him of his very core, but he also seems incapable of bearing the load of the unconventional life.

An interesting study of Edwardian family, social and institutional dysfunction, adolescent misconceptions and sexual naivety -- what we would call a "coming of age novel."
Rickie, emotionally and physically lame,orphaned and messed up by his background, bullied at school and struggling to make sense of the world using the intellectual tools of the day, finds his place as an undergraduate at Cambridge. After that everything gets more complicated as Rickie loses his way!
Now here's the crux, by Shelley, quoted in full, on page 133:
"I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the world a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend,
To cold oblivion--...
....--and so
With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go."
Clever and insightful and capturing the innocence of youth, the book, which E.M. Forster thought was his best and into which he had put more of himself than any other, held my attention to the bitter end. It has sent me off to read more Shelley!

This was the first Forster I read since reading A Room With a View 10 years ago. A Room With a View is one of my absolute favorite classics so I had incredibly high hopes for this one. Sadly, I was disappointed. I still found Forster's writing as beautiful as ever and I loved the detail he put into all the characters. However, the plot seemed nearly nonexistent at several points in the story, there were several times when things seemed to jump around and I was lost and confused within the story. Lastly, I didn't care about the majority of the characters so I truly didn't care what happened to them, and I was also deeply disappointed in the ending. :(. I was so sad that this was so disappointing to me but I do have his other 4 major novels still to read and I'm hoping that I end up loving them as much as Room With a View.

"I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor souls with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and longest journey go."
( Shelly)

The last of Forster's novels I had to read, his second, and supposedly his personal favourite 'of his children', was read as a mix of an audiobook, and a kindle copy. Why a mix ? Because the book has a fair share of philosophy, and also subtle incidents which make a second reading that much more clearer (e.g. Agnes seeing Gerald through someone else ). The novel is a Bildungsroman - meaning a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood - and in that sense quite a success, although it is relatively a challenging read compared to his other fiction.

While Rickie is termed a failure, easily coerced , and manipulated, he ends his life having made the longest journey. His one achievement brings his own end, and yet his work which didn't receive recognition in his time, does so posthumously. Fate of man is cruel, as he trudges along making mistake after mistake, on a journey of self discovery. Compared to Rickie, the other characters of this book are more sure of themselves - Agnes, who is shown as a disaster for a man to marry, unless its someone like Gerald or Stephen - Stewart, who amidst his own failure to prove himself as an intellectual, hangs on to his beliefs, and is shown as the redeemer of Rickie - or even the appalling Emily, for whom other people are discardable for her amusement. In a sense all these people, more strong willed than Rickie, are married to a doctrine of their choice, for better and worse. If analysed properly, for worse, most likely. One could say that possibly the last few months of Rickie were the happiest, as even his manipulative aunt can't coerce him in the end.

The book could receive criticism if published today, given how the main female characters are build, and the words used to describe them - the words "keep her in line" is likely to draw a lot of flak today

In summary, it was an excellent book, and it is easy to see why Forster considered this his favourite. I, for myself wouldn't rush to rate it as my favourite, but I have no hesitation in ranking this alongside his other work, that are more popular.

Rating: ****1/2
First published in 1907

ok generally not a good sign when i've mentally written my goodreads review halfway into the book, particularly if said review was "well, this one was aptly named girlies" BUT forster pulled me back in and there was much i DID like, so my thoughts are much more than my silly little snark but,,,, maybe just read Howard's End instead

A story of disappointed hopes and expectations, I found E.M. Forster’s second novel twittery and portentous and unreal. The character interaction is frequently stiff and unbelievable. It’s difficult to say, for example, whether the death scene in chapter 5 is more or less unconvincing than the love scene in chapter 7; is it creative inhibition or personal inexperience that makes these scenes so unsuccessful? Much of the time, he represents people behaving totally unnaturally with one another – their movements, remarks, attitudes, poses all false. Is Forster simply incapable of doing better at this point, or is he attempting something else? If so, what? There is so much that doesn’t ring true on a human level; I wondered whether the book was supposed to be a fable. The back cover of the Penguin Classics edition highlights its ‘powerful symbolism,’ so I kept my eye out as I was reading; but surely symbolism has to be embedded in a firm and fertile bed of narrative interest and progression: otherwise it’s no more than stones sticking up out of a parched field.

I’m aware from his other fiction that he likes to worry away at the ineffable and inexpressible beyond the everyday. I don’t especially care for this at any time in his writing career, and I think it’s particularly ham-fisted here. I wonder how much of the rhapsodic twaddle of this novel is actually cover for the occasional, pitiably infrequent permission he gives himself to describe young men who may have caught his eye in real life as beautiful and godlike when he gloomily memorializes them in these pages. I get the impression that Gerald and Stephen are Forster’s ‘type,’ and part of them being his type is that they wouldn’t look at him twice; which makes me rather sad for him.

Rickie’s sanctimonious brother-in-law Mr Pembroke is probably the best-realized character (the sort who disapprovingly blue-pencils in the margins of a book he does not like, ‘Childish. One reads no further.’) The minor comic figure of Mrs Lewin is effective, and there are a few ringing insights such as Rickie’s advice to a pious but unhappy schoolboy (‘You can’t be good until you’ve had a little happiness’), and the reaction of his wife when his friend, whom she dislikes, fails to obtain a Cambridge fellowship:

‘Oh, poor, poor fellow!’ said Mrs Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.

It seemed for a while as though the book was picking up as Rickie’s idealism decays and his marriage falls apart. Melodramatic and unconvincing incidents follow, but they are at least narratively propulsive. It wasn’t to last: I laughed out loud at the convenient tragedy in Chapter 29, by which Forster scrupulously chokes off his own authorial daring – it is unforgivably inartistic and inept. Chapter 31 is amazingly bad; in fact, everything after that is pretty terrible.

Another novel with a lame hero, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, came out eight years later – interesting that the lameness can be read as a metaphor for homosexuality in both – and I would much rather reread that, although Forster is of course the ‘greater’ artist. It hardly matters: The Longest Journey is an awful failure to my way of thinking.

What E.M. Forster thought of her novels was the only opinion Virginia Woolf took seriously when she first started publishing them. Learning this from her diaries inspired me to read E.M. Forster. I’d always avoided him out of a bad unreasoning prejudice, mostly against British film. Now that I’ve finally started reading his books in order of publication, each for the first time. He was friendly with the Woolfs, who published some shorter works of his at their Hogarth Press. Forster wrote A Passage to India under Leonard’s encouragement, there’d been a gap of almost twenty years since his last novel. The rest pre-date Virginia’s early books by more than a decade. Reading them almost alongside one another, I’m struck by the multitude of echoes, her characters and plot-lines answering his. He was a model and she studied him, worked him over, moved on. She feels a little heartless by comparison. The Longest Journey, Forster’s favorite among all his books, is enormously lovable after a difficult start. I knew nothing about the story (it’s never been filmed) and would recommend all readers to follow my lead, if possible: skip even a single synopsis and just dive in, for the novel is full of plot twists and genuinely moving surprises.

This started off pretty good for me, then quickly turned into somewhat of a slog. However, I zoomed through the second half and ended up liking it. Boy, what a restrictive downer of a story!

What an odd book! Glimpses of themes Forster better developed in Howard's End.

The Longest Journey. Evidently Forster was proud of this one. Personally, I found it to be interesting enough. His prose is definitely good. The characters - not the kind of people I want in my circle of friends. Far too much drama with this crew!

The beginning of the third section threw me a bit. It took me most of the first chapter in that section to realize that the author had switched to talking about Rickie's parents. He frequently refers to Mr. and Mrs. Elliot in reference to Rickie and his wife. So, the shift to talking about Rickie's parents, also referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Elliot was a little disorienting.

Also, the story is a tragedy - on multiple levels. It is sometimes difficult to decipher where a character's philosophy is or is not Forster's own. But, when the death of a person who is a failure is not a bad thing it would be good to know whether this reflects Forster's own beliefs.

Oh, if you were wondering, The Longest Journey refers to marriage.

Anyway, it was an okay book.

Wonderfully introspective, like all E.M. Forster books, but a tad more slow-paced than most with fewer of the memorable and lovable characters that you expect from his other novels.