It is described by Stephen Spender, I think, as Forster's "most accomplished work". It is flawed, the girl in the novel exceptionally tedious, the ideal "brute savage" too ideal. But there are memorable scenes-the awful opening speech for the new term, the depiction of bullying, the atmosphere of convention and restraint which closes in on Ricky. There is much to be said for the refining qualities of censorship when considering this novel. Whatever one thinks of it, it is a far finer novel than "Maurice". "Maurice" is a work in which Forster is frank about his sexuality. "Longest Journey" is an extended metaphor of the repression of the homosexual and "Longest Journey" the book written in disguise is far better than the revelatory "Maurice". However "The Longest Journey" is gloomy and somewhat implausible. I do not think many people would regard it as a great pleasure to read (in contrast to say, "Passage to India" or "Howard's End".

At one level, I can see why this novel is not one of Forster's more popular stories. And to be sure, it doesn't invoke the same passions as "Where Angels Fear to Tread" or fully explore Forster's ideas of England like "Howards End." But I just loved it anyways. Maybe it was because Forster's absolute and abject terror over heteronormativity jumps out strongly or maybe just because it touches at the heart of struggling against convention for something real. I loved that the events other authors would have classified as "major" are brushed over with a sentence (any deaths are mentioned in the same way vaguely interesting wallpaper would be) and arguments and minor disagreements are presented in their full glory. There's something so wonderful in suggesting that it's these minor events that define a soul and the trajectories of our lives, not the big things.

The novel features Rickie's symbolic journey from the intellectual world at Cambridge to the drudge of a working in a job to which he is ill suited. He loses his sensitivity and aspirations of being a writer, stifled by a conventional life expounded by his wife Agnes and her brother Herbert.

It is gratifying to witness the turning point in his journey as he goes forth with Stephen, the half brother he had been kept from acknowledging and regains the person he once was. Agnes thinks "Poor aimless Rickie... He will come back in the end." but "That same day, Rickie, feeling neither poor nor aimless..."

I appreciated how Forster illustrated the theme of individualism versus social conventions, progress versus status quo in this novel, often viewed as a minor work compared to his later novels.

Forster’s novels still haven’t lived up to my first Forster, A Room With a View. However, much like Howards End and Where Angels Fear to Tread, I can see myself rereading this in the future.

I read this 1904 novel in the mid '70s as part of a fourth year English course which focused on the Bloomsbury Group. I found it to be quite a sad but engaging coming-of-age tale in which the protagonist, who is lame and frail, struggles repeatedly to come to terms with those around him, be they family, school mates or friends. His compassion for a friend who has lost her fiancée leads him eventually into marriage. His desires to become a writer seem to develop into a situation in which he finds himself to be rather a stern schoolteacher. His encounter with a boisterous, larger-than life figure who is somehow related to him results in their final fateful journey. The scheming, intolerance and extreme selfishness of others often seem to be more than he can handle.

I strongly disagreed with my professor, who took a passage about a cow to interpret that the novel was about epistemological philosophy and the true determination of reality. On the other hand, I took a short passage on coinage to expand a theme of personal integrity and the need to not corrupt one’s purity of character (as the value of coins are deflated through alloys). Who knows who was right?

That such issues can arise is a testament to Forster’s maturity as a novelist, the complexity of his understandings of human nature and the difficulty he saw in modern man’s efforts to understand both himself and the world in which he lives.
Recommended.

5th book of 2023.

2.5. I thought about giving this book 3-stars but as I slid it back on my bookcase I thought to myself, This was just okay. It is long, 400 pages, plotless, mostly without emotion, as I called it in one update, bloodless, with only a few strikes of poignancy. Forster does away with most descriptions and instead focuses on dialogue, which meant, at least, it read fast in a lot of places. The whole family dynamic that's going on isn't very compelling and I found it quite predictable, only in the last quarter was I actually surprised by the story's direction. It reminded me of Jude the Obscure, partly John Williams's Stoner, too, but I love both those books, so this doesn't come close to them in power. I've already read A Room With a View, I did at university years back and remember enjoying it quite a lot, so perhaps that's where Forster's work takes a turn. I've almost exclusively heard good things about Howard's End, and that's next for me, so I'm pleased about that. Again, I think Forster is good, I don't hate him, but these early books are fairly weak. Funny, the other day I was thinking about how in music, people are often nostalgic for the first album or their early work. Quite often with musicians they bring out late career stuff and people complain it isn't like their old stuff. And yet with novelists, it seems the opposite. We forgive debuts and early works of great writers as being, well, early works, and instead focus on their later masterpieces. Only few writers have better early novels, Hemingway, for example. Forster is of the other camp, I think: steadily better with every book.

Not quite as fond of this as Maurice or Passage to India but beautifully written and very tragic.

It wasn't until I was 2/3rds done with this book before I stopped making dumb jokes in my head about the title and it being difficult to get through/reading it being, true to form, the longest journey; BUT, once things picked up, I really enjoyed TLJ.

I want to re-read this novel someday. On second reading the dialogue would be easier to track (there are many hard-to-follow he-said, she-said, they-said back-and-forths which require fine-tooth comb levels of attention), and the inner stories of the main characters would be more emotionally engaging. Also, as the novel is split into three large sections, it'd be interesting the second time around to pay closer attention to the transitions and framing of the overall timeline.

Overall, there was lots of pretty, funny, and generally enjoyable writing in TLJ. The first half was really difficult to chew through, but the second half made it worthwhile.

An inverted bildungsroman, Wikipedia said, which is luckily all I read. I agreed at the time even though I wasn't all the way through it, but what's great about this book is you're not really sure who the coming of age story is really about. As a 40 year old, university is literally halfway back in time, but the start of the story there took me instantly back in a realistic way that made me realize that EM Forester must have loved university as much as I did and regarded those years (not high school) as "the magic years" as Rickie calls them.

There was also something so real (and depressing if you're a pre-WW1 English somewhat entitled and wealthy gentleman) about university being magic in the sense of it both good and bad. What I'm getting at is the notion that even though you feel like you can do anything and the world is going to crack under your greatness, there's the brutal truth that you need to actually live life first to figure out how to apply all that magic you picked up at university. Not giving anything away but I think my favorite character is a book publisher that Rickie goes to see near the end of the first section that lays it out to him more gently than I would expect anyone in this time and age and its inability to stick is when I realized how long this journey was really going to be.

I genuinely like Forster but I found "The Longest Journey" trying. None of the characters are very likeable but even worse, many of the characters seem fabricated from a set of stock characteristics that should hold up as a whole but leaves the reader wanting for its lack of poignancy.

I cannot fathom whether this is done deliberately or is an unfortunate error in judgment of character, but I'm liable to believe in the former rather than the latter, since Forster had claimed this book to be one of his personal favourites.

Rickie is perhaps the most fleshed out, but one issue with Rickie is that he embodies the pretense of Romanticism but he fails in every aspect to actually gain insight into what the Romantic ideal may mean when experienced. He is always just enough: mediocre in its most bland sense, a character without a spine who can be molded and manipulated by whomever -- pathetically, a character without character.

I can see how an argument can be made that Rickie is the poster-child for the ills Romanticism has done to ordinary people. Very few of us are extraordinary, talented, gifted but Romanticism would have us believe that anything is possible -- if we put our efforts in the right directions be it talent, love, sensibility. Rickie does put his efforts towards these but he is inadequate a subject as he lacks real pathos largely because he doesn't experience but imbues events and people in his life with pretensions: he is, to be quite plain, a "tell-er" not a "show-er"; he says lots of things without really seeming to understand what it is he's actually saying. When that doesn't work, he attempts to argue (often quite unconvincingly) philosophically -- thus distancing himself further from the truth of the experience and therefore relinquishing any chance of true insight or pathos.

What is possibly most aggravating is creating a person without spine, without character, without any clarity on the meaning of his own life or who he is then to shift so suddenly to what...finding himself in the end? I find this motive tired and unrealistic. There is nothing within the breadth of the novel that would suggest Rickie has the capability of grasping his own true self -- even in the end, he imbues his personhood by identifying with others. For all his wants, he is limited: he cannot be extraordinary because he lacks the imagination, the sensitivity, the intelligence, the self-awareness, and the courage to be so.

If this were the intent, then I can understand why "The Longest Journey" is so trying, so wanting in its meaning because attempting to recognise and capture meaning in a character who is meant to be ordinary is, I'm sure, challenging... and then I remember Emma, I remember Emile, I remember Werther, I remember Philip, and Catherine -- each, in their own way, fighting against societal standards, each in their own way, trying to meet the Romantic ideal only to fail miserably. With this, I have to admit that while the attempt is admirable, "The Longest Journey" just does not touch me, for the characters are all too two-dimensional and too affected for the journey to be worthwhile.

As shocking as it may be, I'd never read anything by E.M. Forster. I happened upon my dusty, 1922 printed copy by luck as I browsed through one of the buildings in my favorite used book store, The Book Barn in Niantic, CT. What drew me to the book at the time was the following blurb printed among the opening pages: A New Directions Wartime Book This Complete Copyright Edition Is Produced In Full Compliance With The Government's Regulations For Conserving Paper And Other Essential Materials. I'd never seen that blurb before but figured if the Government thought it was valuable enough to waste paper and ink and binding materials on at the time, it was probably still worth a read today.

Anyway I write about the plot here is going to sound too simple to be appreciated. But that's the thing about good literature I think. It doesn't take sweeping plots and mass extinctions or explosions to be great. There's a lot to be said for the language of a piece. Here, it's landscapes that get the sweeping lines and human nature, when described get brief, stark lines. Philosophy and poetry and prose in one.

The story centers around Rickie,whom we meet at the start of his academic career as a student in Cambridge. An orphan who is nonetheless surrounded by the friendship of his peers, including Ansell. Forster contrasts the varied upbringings of these two boys while making us as readers decide whether a cow still exists before its being viewed. Ansell, having been brought up to follow his passions, in this case, Philosophy, believes yes. Rickie is more focused out the window of his dorm room. The novel follows Rickie primarily as the years pass and how he came to know and love and marry and then not love Agnes. We hear about how Ansell's faring once in awhile and about the academic failures he experiences. We come to understand why Ansell disliked Agnes so much and to appreciate even more how great a friend he was for Rickie when Rickie was told of a family scandal concerning one of his parents.

I experienced each page as if a very distinct voice was reading the story to me. I was prompted many times to ask myself if I would have behaved the same way in Rickie's situation. Even Agnes, who can appear as cold and uncaring and unlikeable, has her charms. Forster's entreats us to forgive her her actions towards Rickie and family and he explains why so very bluntly it's impossible to truly hate her. It's Forster's voice that perfectly illustrates the vicissitudes of Rickie's life, physically and emotionally. We're made aware of his physical deformity right away, but his struggle with whether he wants to be a part of society as he's expected to be by virtue of his inheritance or to follow his own inner dreams of connecting more with the natural world prove a greater focus.

"The Longest Journey" is a novel you just have to experience to know what it's about. It's kind of like life in that way.

The last of E.M. Forster’s novels I had left to read and even though this is said to be his personal favorite, I’m afraid it fell short for me. There are the usual up tight Edwardian characters with secrets unspoken and revealed, passions repressed, some beautiful writing and a mix of the comic and the tragic- although here we seem much heavier on the tragic. It focuses on Rickie, a young lame Cambridge student who wants to write fiction and his relationships with those around him- Ansell a philosophical fellow student, Agnes and Herbert, long time friends, his aunt Mrs Failing and her companion Stephen.

Forster usually likes to keep his tragedy until the end of his novels but here it seems to be littered throughout and the restrained way in which it is largely dealt with has the effect of making us care little either. Characterization and dialogue are always his strengths but here there is less wit and humor and more philosophy, some interesting discussions on marriage, for the book is named after Shelley’s idea of ‘the longest journey’ being the life you spent with one partner, but I have to say sometimes I just got lost or missed the point I assumed he was trying to make.

The book is is in three sections and when it turns to the middle section and life at a prestigious boarding school, it became more engaging and the characters become more complex, even those you love to dislike have their sympathetic side. The secret revealed in part one is further explored and gains momentum in part two and we have some kind of resolution in part three although it doesn’t end well for all.

It feels like a book that requires a reread or to be studied in a class like many of Forster’s novels. I’m often left with the sense that I missed something when I read him but in this one perhaps more than most and although there was much to enjoy and appreciate, this won’t go down as a favorite of mine.