The Longest Journey (1907)

This novel starts off in Cambridge, where the main character, Rickie, is an undergraduate. Philosophical discussions are held, and nature is appreciated. The main character is sensitive, with literary inclinations, and a partially crippled foot. After Cambridge, Rickie is followed through life and unto his death, with marriage, employment, and family goings-on filling the interval.
The emphases of the novel are nature, human nature, emotions, class, poetry, art, philosophy, and family. Though the dramatic plot and characterisation were pretty good, it is the literary style and the ideas in this book that I most enjoyed. Some novels feel like they take ages to read, but this one seemed to be gone before I knew it, and felt far shorter than its 300 odd pages. This is usually a good sign. ( )

חלקים מרגשים וכתיבה יפה מאוד לפרקים, אבל הרבה מזה ​אנכרוניסטי או לא מובן. סחבתי גם את הקריאה יותר מדי​ ( )

I had mixed feelings about this book. At times, I was quite engrossed, and there were some genuinely interesting plot twists. However, this wasn't true of the novel as a whole, and I found that the first part in particular (Cambridge) dragged. ( )

One of the most intriguing relationships in the novel (and you're introduced to it early so, so this is not a spoiler in any way) is that Rickie shares with Stewart Ansell, who determinedly challenges -- and perpetuates -- class prejudice."To be born one thing and grow up another -- Ansell had accomplished this without weakening one of the ties that bound him to his home." And, ironically, it's Stewart who most notably rebuffs Agnes, who has come to visit Rickie, but has been completely and entirely ignored by the draper's son. The Longest Journey is filled with such contradictions and injuries, and it contains more than its share of disappointments and tragedies. Nonetheless, Lionel Trilling considered it "perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate" of Forster's novels. It's also of interest to serious Forster readers for its autobiographical elements (the most obvious being Rickie's desire to write) and although it took me many months to move beyond the novel's first 100 pages (which does make this, of Forster's novels, my Longest Journey through his fiction), I'm pleased to have read it. ( )

The longest (and dreariest) journey referred to is marriage, or partnership with a single woman. The title is taken from a line of the poem Epipsychidion by Shelley, one of many echoes of Shelley's life that you come across in this book. Shelley's poem was inspired by his extra-marital love for Emilia Vivani, a love which Andre Maurois suggests was for an embodied ideal rather than for the real woman. Love for the ideal rather than the actual leads to the unsuccessful marriage at the centre of this book. And yet it seemed to me that the author was not discussing only this marriage and this woman, but marriage in general. Every marriage in this book leads to disappointment. Continued ( )