Flawed, but at the same time dear.
A lot of Forster himself in this one.

Loved it so much.

There's a bit in the first or second chapter when Rickie reflects on how Cambridge opened up his world and made it inviting and beautiful, and it stayed with me months after I read it because it was so real. Rickie's experience is pretty close to Forster's, and I'm guessing that the belonging Rickie felt at Cambridge matches Forster's almost identically. If you're interested in Forster as a person, seeing Rickie's positive experiences might give you a lot of secondhand joy too!

This is super autobiographical (I recommend the free documentary called The Longest Journey if you want to know more about the background), and it felt personal. There's love in here and a lot of self reflection (plus a Whitman quote because Forster knows what's up) Felt good reading this as a college student. It spoke to me at this stage in my life.

Free download available at Project Gutenberg

3* A Passage to India
3* Howards End
4* A Room with a View
3* Where Angels Fear to Tread
4* Maurice
3* The Story of the Siren
3* The Road from Colonus
3* The Obelisk
3* The Machine Stops
3* The Longest Journey
TR Pharos and Pharillon
TR The Celestial Omnibus and other Stories
TR Alexandria: A History and a Guide

About E.M. Forster:
5* The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein

3.5
not my favourite of e.m forster’s work , but i still enjoyed it nonetheless. i really loved how this novel was a much like a fictionalised memoir as it had such significance to forster himself

A bit long and tedious at times, but with some beautiful passages.

Technically, I know that other reviewers are probably right that this isn't Forster's best work. For me, though, it was one of those experiences where a book finds you at the perfect time. Rarely have I found a protagonist as relatable as Rickie Elliott. If you are or were a person in your late twenties struggling with loneliness and feeling unable to recapture the sense of connection and meaning you once had, read this book! You'll be comforted to know others have been in your exact place, and you'll feel newly inspired to try to improve your life.

There was so much that resonated with me: how magical one's undergraduate years are, how afterwards nothing felt quite so real and it seems like you’ve lost the password to life, how lies within the family and blindly following conventions and societal expectations poison a person, how it’s tempting to try to replace connection with an impersonal “doing good,” but it never quite works because you need a little happiness before you're capable of doing good, the belief in struggling to follow your values even if you’re bad at them, how friendships and books and the earth can save us. (Not that I agree with everything in it—in particular, there are a few moments of misogyny that I could have done without. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it.)

In my opinion, the plot was not as engaging as some of E. M. Forster's other novels - such as "Maurice", "A Room with a View", or "Howards End." Despite this, the novel still possesses Forster's wonderful style of writing, intriguing characters, and fascinating analysis of Britain's class system at the time. Anyone who loves Forster should give this book a chance!

Not my favorite of Mr Forster's novels, and it moved at a slow pace. But like all his other efforts there is a lot to chew on. We meet our hero Rickie, who lost his parents at an early age, while he's preparing to graduate from Cambridge and enter this old world. Like all of us he discovers the 'earth' isn't quite as easy as he thought. Actually it's downright difficult: friends, family, and career are the culprits. But there is something indomitable about the human spirit, and there is that unseen force that moves us along our way in spite of all our intentions. 4 stars.

A neglected Forster, very effective, but also disconcerting. Forster (1879-1970), a teen during the Oscar Wilde scandal, is one of thousands of Brit males who never recovered from obscene UK laws, in "civilized Brit," that went on for 60+ years.... In this ambitious and, for EM, "personal" novel, the delicate, aspiring writer Rickie, falls automatically into marriage w a comely, but shallow woman who selfishly manipulates his life into one of convention and middle-class hypocrisy. Passively, he finds himself smothered....into a fake life that he doesnt want.

The fakeness is jarred upon learning that he has a half-brother, a butch nature boy, "a social thunderbolt," writes EM. This novel, like others, deals with illegitimacy and inheritance. Secret births/parentage and stolen inheritances were the norm in those dark 1900 days. ~ There are many deaths: EM tosses them off while detailing, by contrast, an angry dinner where everything is hurled to the floor. (EM's dramatic choices may distress some readers). This is not a plot for a Merchant-Ivory movie. The novel inhabits the hurt (including Rickie's "lameness," some years later examined by MOM's Philip Carey, as a gay symbol) that EM held silent until his death.

Gentle, kind, a humanist, EM grew up amongst upper middle-class women: there was a nice inheritance from a great-aunt; he lived, off-on, w his mother until her death in 1945. (Ekk...) He liked working-class men, and, happily, found some who brought him to life. Published in 1907, this novel of repression reveals his fantasies. Critic Lionel Trilling, a Forster enthusiast, called it a "passionate" novel; it isn't. It's an intense novel. (Trilling and wife Diana would have collapsed if they knew EM was gay). The way of the world from 1900 to 1940 to 2020.

As someone that graduated from college a little over a year ago, I found this story relatable. I miss academia and writing and reading and discussions about philosophy. It was hard to translon to a job, where the intricacies of questioning life's meaning and the joys of a liberal arts degree is pushed to the side as you adapt to the mundane, such as family commitments and a routine job. Having already read Howard's End, I knew I loved Forster's writing, but was pleasantly surprised on how connected I felt with the book. I think this is a classic everyone should read, espically those who recently graduated. It is a reminder to not loose focus on what made you love the education you had, but instead the need to weave it into your life, which Rickie struggles to do.

This is a lesser-known Forster, but it's beautifully written, funny and tremendously satisfying.

Some of Forster’s books are lyrical, elegant, witty and aloof: ‘A Passage to India’, ‘Howards End’ and ‘A Room with a View’ all play on social conventions and examine in detail the impact of class, nationality, sex, religion, society and history on day-to-day morals and relationships. I love all that, but I also have a soft spot for his ‘lesser’ novels, of which ‘The Longest Journey’ is one (I’d say ‘Maurice’ is the other) because they are so much more personal, and the mask momentarily slips.

We meet idealistic undergraduate and aspiring writer Rickie at Cambridge with his philosophising friends, but before long, he is married to the controlling Agnes, her previous intended having conveniently dropped dead after playing football (sudden death is one of Forster’s specialties). Soon, Rickie’s writing ambitions have fallen away after he takes up a teaching post in a private school run by Herbert, Agnes’ stuffy and judgemental brother, a man who takes offence at the implication that he uses a hot water bottle, ‘an unmanly luxury in which he never indulged, contenting himself with night-socks’.

All that would make a sad enough Bildungsroman of failure and thwarted ambition, but the discovery of Rickie’s illegitimate half-brother, Stephen, at the home of his eccentric and quarrelsome Aunt Emily livens up the pace, and soon there is an inheritance and Stephen’s villainous habits (drunkenness) to worry about, not to mention his disarming lack of guile and his basic decency. This loose plot, hinging on something that is pretty irrelevant to the modern reader, is not the appeal; for me, it’s the interplay of characters that convey deeper attitudes. As usual, the relations between men are the most interesting, whether that be the awkward silences between Rickie and his academic friend Anselm or Rickie’s attraction towards athletic but bullying Gerald, or indeed his own half-brother Stephen. The latter is a positively Lawrentian force of nature, so there’s plenty of homoerotic speculating to hand, for example as Rickie views his half-brother the morning after he has been put to bed dead drunk:

Last night [Stephen] had seemed so colourless, so negligible. In a few hours, he had recaptured motion and passion, and the imprint of the sunlight and the wind. He stood, not consciously heroic, with arms that dangled from broad, stooping shoulders, and with feet that played with a hassock on the carpet. But his hair was beautiful against the grey sky, and his eyes, recalling the sky unclouded, shot past the intruder as if to some worthier vision.

(Agnes is afforded no such description, and the woman are universally unpleasant in one way or another: fair enough.) There’s also plenty of Forster’s usual wit and sarcasm, but it's ultimately a novel about failure: failure of hope, failure to be true to oneself, failure to understand in time. That makes it not a great novel, but a revealing and intriguing one, where we get a little closer to the author himself.