I love Forster. This novel is not as tidy as his others, but I liked it nonetheless. The ideas seemed to have more passion behind them, even if they weren't brought together with the same clarity as in the other books.

“Preserving Family Secrets—Honoring Family Dreams”
This 1907 novel probes the gradual maturation of a young Cambridge student, Ricki Elliot—grappling with various life issues. It is in his favorite haunt, a delightful dell some distance from the ‘Varsity, that he recounts to his male peers the sad tale of his childhood and youth; for this fellow, smaller and lame, is now without parents. His very nickname was his father’s cruel jest re the boy’s rickety locomotion. Prone to daydreaming about being a writer, but lacking the nerve to embark on this as a career--for fear of ridicule and financial failure--he allows himself to be swayed toward other possible careers by people whom he respects—or feels he ought to--including a dowager aunt and pretty Agnes--a dryad in the dell--whom he’s known for years. A self-styled philosopher named Stewart Ansell is his closest friend at Cambridge—which Ricki later views as an abode of peace—the only place the orphan considers Home.

At first glance this novel appears the story of personal failure and misguided choices. What to study, whom to marry and where to live--yet there is more than these superficialities lying beneath the roadbed. Referencing a poem by Shelley the title refers not to a tangible journey of miles; rather to the soul’s journey of self discovery. Ricki’s disastrous career as a master at a 2nd rate boarding school, combined with a gradually loveless marriage to a woman who denies him his dreams of writing, make him realize that he is slowly writhing in a kind of spiritual bondage to her ambitious intellectual brute of an older brother. For this is a novel really treats the subject of Brothers and their role in life.

Family secrets are difficult to keep under wraps for many years—gradually eroding the bearer’s emotional equilibrium. The human desire to unburden oneself—either out of guilt or for mean revenge—can not be denied for ever. Once the secret slips or is blurted out--how to wrestle with the consequences? Shattered by the discovery (leaked by a vengeful aunt) that the odious boy who bullied him at school turns out to be his own half brother Ricki is tormented by indecision on how he should react publicly. His stuffy wife, housemistress in her brother’s “house” is ambitious both to protect the family name but also to ensure that Ricki is not cheated out of his inheritance by this upstart “beggar on horseback.” Alas, Ricki only knows Half the truth, while that scamp, Stephen Wonham, is kept in total ignorance of his illicit provenance.

Whom to tell and how much, when and most of all—Why--consumes the mental efforts of the young, childless Elliotts, as Ricki undertakes,pianfully alone, the longest journey: to discover what kind of man he is and how he should treat his newly-found incorrigible brother. Narrated against the backdrop of Salisbury’s chalky downs, the plot slowly unfolds to a startling pitch of withheld information and dramatic denouements. Toying with readers’ lack of knowledge EMF reveals that the brothers’ lives are inevitably intertwined, even as the distant ancient Roman Rings.

(November 21, 2013. I welcome dialogue with teachers.)

CRESCENDO


Il romanzo è ambientato nel Wiltshire.

Nella esigua produzione di narrativa di E.M.Forster (sei titoli – invece, molti più dedicati alla saggistica), questo è il romanzo meno noto. Il suo secondo, il suo preferito, quello che gli era più caro. Uno di quelli più autobiografici: direi che su questo versante solo Maurice si spinge oltre.
Ed è l’unico rimasto senza adattamento cinematografico e televisivo.

Il protagonista studia in un’università di quelle, parole dello stesso Forster, che formano ragazzi con il corpo ben sviluppato, la mente discretamente sviluppata e il cuore completamente atrofizzato.
Facile intuire che per Rickie la vita non è facile: è un’anima fragile, un vaso di coccio in mezzo a tanti vasi in ferro. Per di più è claudicante, lo si potrebbe definire zoppo, e qualcuno lo fa, qualcuno di quelli che hanno cominciato a bullizzarlo sin da quando era piccolo: preso in giro per la sua fragilità, il suo difetto fisico, anche se l’omosessualità non viene menzionata.
Come dal suo (presunto) amico Gerald, fidanzato con Agnes. E quando Gerald muore su un campo sportivo, Rickie non riesce a trovare di meglio che proporsi a Agnes come futuro marito. Chiaro gesto cavalleresco: ora che la donzella è rimasta sola e abbandonata, il cavaliere senza macchia e un po’ di paura, le offre il suo braccio.



Le speranze letteraria di Rickie vanno presto fallite. D’altra parte Rickie scrive libri che l’editore rifiuta perché fuori dai generi, senza etichetta commerciale:
Scrivi una bella storia di fantasmi, oppure qualcosa di assolutamente realistico, e saremo felici di pubblicarti, gli dice.
E invece Rickie finisce per seguire il cognato, il fratello di sua moglie, che è diventato direttore di una scuola: Agnes sarà la donna di casa, e Rickie uno degli insegnanti. Addio sogni di gloria.

Se non che un bel giorno appare all’orizzonte di Rickie un fratellastro, figlio illegittimo di suo padre. È più giovane di Rickie, più forte e atletico, meno istruito, meno educato, più rustico, ma forse anche più diretto. All’inizio i fratellastri non legano, anche perché Stephen, il giovane dei due, ha una propensione per la bottiglia.
Credo che sia la successiva scoperta che Stephen è in realtà figlio illegittimo di sua madre, e non suo padre, che spinge i due fratellastri a legare di più. Per Rickie è anche una forma di crescita personale, un modo per sfuggire al giogo di sua moglie, bigotta e provinciale, e del di lei fratello, nonché boss di Rickie. E in questo il racconto si dimostra bildungsroman.
Purtroppo il compimento esistenziale e anche artistico di Rickie avviene troppo tardi. Ma Stephen, il suo ritrovato fratello, riuscirà a fare pubblicare postumi ma con successo i racconti di Rickie.



La prosa di Forster scorre lenta come un fiume pacifico. Ma in crescendo: man mano che procede la rigenerazione di Rickie attraverso il ricongiungimento con Stephen, man mano che il protagonista si emancipa e conquista la sua dignità, il tono diventa più largo, in qualche modo più impetuoso. Un crescendo. Appassionato.
E credo sia appunto questo “il viaggio più lungo”: non tanto la vita in sé, quanto il proprio percorso di sviluppo personale e interiore, la ricerca della propria integrità.


E.M. Forster al lavoro.

On reading this for the second time, I appreciated more fully how EM Forster's second novel started to explore two themes presented more dramatically in, for instance, 'Howards End' and 'A Passage To India' - middle-class morality regarding affairs out of wedlock and illegitimacy, and the effects of a spiritual and psychological crisis.
Young Rickie Elliot's 'Marabar Caves' experience takes place within the circles of Stonehenge, where his aunt casually and cruelly lets drop the bombshell that the young illegitimate ward, Stephen, to whom she's given a home is actually his half-brother. To Rickie - sensitive, philosophical, Cambridge-educated and newly married - this opens up a dark and uncomfortable awareness of what lies outside of his own ivory tower, and an obligation to interact with the sordidness of the real world.
Stephen Wonham himself is a handsome, straightforward, honourable but pugnacious young man who is absolutely without guile, and who, whilst aware of his illegitimate status, is reasonablu educated, respects himself and sees no reason to kowtow to those who may consider themselves his betters. His character is, apparently, based on Forster's own encounter with a shepherd lad in Wiltshire in 1904, three years before 'The Longest Journey' was published.
It takes the intervention of Rickie's maverick philosopher friend from his Cambridge days, Stewart Ansell, to make him realise that his half-brother has as much right to love and acceptance in life as he has himself, though the revelation that he is his mother's son, rather than his father's as Rickie has automatically presumed, almost breaks him.
It's a meandering, introspective read with a sad ending, and doesn't quite achieve the emotional authenticity of Forster's later writing, especially as regards female characters - but it was, apparently, the author's favourite of his novels and as such I think it should be more widely appreciated.

Mijn laatste Forster, echt wel the end of an era. Ik had The Longest Journey als laatste werk bewaard aangezien het Forster’s persoonlijke favoriet was en hoopte dat het zo ook weer een nieuwe favoriet van mezelf zou worden. Hoewel het geen meesterwerk als Howards End is (ook vrij moeilijk te evenaren) en me (nog) niet zo nauw aan het hart ligt als Maurice of A Room with a View, bewijst The Longest Journey weer Forster’s talent voor het aankaarten van maatschappelijke hypocrisie en de struggle van jezelf aan te passen aan maatschappelijke waarden die niet overeenkomen met je persoonlijke en de tragedie die dit ontketent. Een heel mooi (en beetje tragisch) werk waarin ik toch wel wat van mezelf herkende in de protagonist, en na het lezen van Forster’s biografie ook veel autobiografische elementen herkende. Ben heel benieuwd hoe mijn kijk over dit boek over de jaren verandert met elke keer dat ik het ga herlezen. Hoe dan ook, laat ik deze era en te lange review eindigen met: live laugh love E.M.Forster (the only author in my opinion) <333

Forster is best known for such classics as 'A Passage to India' and 'Howards End'; his other work does not get the exposure it deserves, and so 'The Longest Journey' has fallen out of its natural readership. This is a terrible shame; Forster wrote this book before he turned thirty, and yet it contains such wisdom and tact that you would expect it rather to have been the product of an older mind. But then Forster was always ahead, of himself, of his times, and of the literary world in general. I felt like I was soaking myself in culture with this novel, and adored every sentence. Remarkable.

4 stars - English Ebook

Quote: Rickie, on whose carpet the matches were being dropped, did not like to join in the discussion. It was too difficult for him. He could not even quibble. If he spoke, he should simply make himself a fool. He preferred to listen, and to watch the tobacco-smoke stealing out past the window-seat into the tranquil October air. He could see the court too, and the college cat teasing the college tortoise, and the kitchen-men with supper-trays upon their heads. Hot food for one—that must be for the geographical don, who never came in for Hall; cold food for three, apparently at half-a-crown a head, for some one he did not know; hot food, a la carte—obviously for the ladies haunting the next staircase; cold food for two, at two shillings—going to Ansell’s rooms for himself and Ansell, and as it passed under the lamp he saw that it was meringues again. Then the bedmakers began to arrive, chatting to each other pleasantly, and he could hear Ansell’s bedmaker say, “Oh dang!” when she found she had to lay Ansell’s tablecloth; for there was not a breath stirring. The great elms were motionless, and seemed still in the glory of midsummer, for the darkness hid the yellow blotches on their leaves, and their outlines were still rounded against the tender sky. Those elms were Dryads—so Rickie believed or pretended, and the line between the two is subtler than we admit. At all events they were lady trees, and had for generations fooled the college statutes by their residence in the haunts of youth.

But what about the cow? He returned to her with a start, for this would never do. He also would try to think the matter out. Was she there or not? The cow. There or not. He strained his eyes into the night.

Either way it was attractive. If she was there, other cows were there too. The darkness of Europe was dotted with them, and in the far East their flanks were shining in the rising sun. Great herds of them stood browsing in pastures where no man came nor need ever come, or plashed knee-deep by the brink of impassable rivers. And this, moreover, was the view of Ansell. Yet Tilliard’s view had a good deal in it. One might do worse than follow Tilliard, and suppose the cow not to be there unless oneself was there to see her. A cowless world, then, stretched round him on every side. Yet he had only to peep into a field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life.

Suddenly he realized that this, again, would never do. As usual, he had missed the whole point, and was overlaying philosophy with gross and senseless details. For if the cow was not there, the world and the fields were not there either. And what would Ansell care about sunlit flanks or impassable streams? Rickie rebuked his own groveling soul, and turned his eyes away from the night, which had led him to such absurd conclusions.-

Not Forster's best, for me, but still well written and complex.

Try Passage to India, Howard's End, Room with a View, or Maurice, you will be pleasntly surprised!

Another book I stopped reading around page 50, although out of respect to its author (hard to imagine the same man wrote something as magnificent as *A Passage to India*) I didn't throw it against the wall. Orphan ingenu Rickie recognizes -- correctly -- that Angela and Gerald do not love each other, Gerald being both unloving and unlovable; one page later Rickie sees Gerald forcing himself on Angela against her will (this ends, fortunately, only in a kiss), whereupon Rickie starts idolizing their relationship as some kind of Love for the Ages. I had to reread these pages several times to make sure I wasn't missing something -- like, say, a missing signature of pages into which an entirely new couple had been introduced and was being referred to.

A few pages later, Rickie, made aware that the two have to postpone marriage because Gerald doesn't have any money to speak of, offers him a lifetime subvention from his inheritance. As if this weren't a spectacular faux pas that would've made Gerald lose face big time, should I also mention that Gerald had been one of the bullies who regularly tormented Richie in public school?

Masochism runs deep in certain corners of the British psyche -- certainly in Forster's -- but I guess I'm at an age at which I derive no pleasure from reading a 300-page account of a doormat.

“The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, ‘This man has worth, this man is worthless.’ And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it now, there were treasures that it could not buy.”

Perhaps the stock went out of fashion, perhaps there had been a recall, perhaps she’d bought a Christmas fruitcake and waited too long, somehow December was skipped. The possibilities are endless. “The Longest Journey” (the title based on a poem by Shelley) made me both laugh out loud and commiserate greatly. A fantastic read, the kind of book that one finishes and then flops one’s hand about and wonders what next? All the world is a stage, and don’t forget you are standing in the groove of a few worn planks yourself. Can we identify with everyone? Can we love all humans? Can we throw off Christianity and maintain morality? Who will die for our sins with their legs cut by a train? A cripple? Stronger still, can we give into our animal urges and justify being human? What is nature? Is “natural” to be tolerated?

This was a strange book and, in parts, hard to follow because of the dense philosophical thought ( I mean, is the cow actually real?), and the disjointed flow of the narrative.

It was published in 1907, barely post Victorian times and before the rumblings of the Great War and there are large elements of it that feel unrecognisable because of its setting but I enjoyed it overall as it gave me so much to think about. The language is poetic at times, which I loved. However I’m still not sure about the ending, as it came as a bit of a shock.

All of the characters are flawed, very flawed, although Ansell is an outlier, and none of them are particularly likable. However, they’re drawn with a deftness that if you met any of them in a particular situation you might find an aspect of them agreeable and be in solidarity with their point of view. Even Herbert has his fair and generous side despite his very narrow world view. So although Forster uses them to play out his clashes between the classes, between insularity and intellect, and between religion and belief, they’re not complete caricatures.

The book’s perception of women, as either incidental or manipulative, made me roll my eyes, particularly as one of its central themes was about love and brotherhood of humanity. I don’t actually know much about Forster’s life and experiences and I know he was of a different time, so this is noted and I’ll move on.

I have read a couple of Forster’s more well-known books in my youth, but this has made me want to go back and read them again.

in this novel, Forster introduced us Rickie Elliott, a student at Cambridge University, and we follow along his story. after pining after a lady for some years, fate brings them together and we follow their lives outside Cambridge, working at the boarding school where her brother also worked. for Rickie, along with sudden and various family issues, this life brought about loneliness, an overwhelming feeling of loss—personal, professional, idealistic—,and we observe as he slowly descends into a life full to the brim with despair, cruelness, malice and deceit.

while I had some difficulty navigating the first 100 pages of this book, as it dragged quite a bit, eventually I got into its rhythm. away from the philosophical questions and the personal quandaries introduced in those hundred pages, the last two thirds of the novel were quicker to digest.

now, in no way this change of pace brought me to a place where I saw myself raving about the book. it was hard to delve in the philosophy onto which we’re thrown as readers from the first sentence, but the questions posed were interesting and the relationship between the students who gave them voice were too, and I wished to see that story prolonged, a study of those sensibilities drawn.

alas, it was not to be. Forster explores mostly everyone but who I want to learn about. from the get-go, I was totally and vehemently disgusted by what I supposed (rightly) to be the love interest. maybe that was the intent (and good for the author, he bloody did it), but my feelings toward Agnes Pembroke did not reverse in the slightest throughout the book, and probably were even accentuated with every time she opened her mouth.

I wanted more of Stephen, more of the late Mrs. Elliott, even more of Tony Failing. more of Ansell!! good heavens, Ansell was probably the only sane person in this story.

despite its shortcomings, I didn’t dislike the book. yes, the characters were mostly boring, yes the story was all-together boring too, even with its twists (that I myself did not see coming), but I regard it rather as a fair attempt at creating a ‘bildungsroman’. it just lacked the ‘bildung’ aspect. the appearance of the characters I liked the most here and there made the book tolerable and I endured it so until I made it to the end.

2,75/5

Oh my god, this was challenging to read, but so worth it! Not nearly as difficult as something like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, mind you, but definitely a book that you have to go back and reread passages to figure out what's happening. I think I could read this book fifty times and still not pick out all the underpinning elements Forster throws in. All I can say is that I was very proud of myself when I DID make the connections because they always added a lot to my understanding of the characters. Brilliant, Forster, just brilliant.