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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780679748151
ISBN: 0679748156
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1993-12-21
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1993-12-21
Studio: Vintage

In this searching tragicomedy of manners, personalities, and world views, E. M. Forster explores the "idea of England" he would later develop in Howard's End. Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the love-smitten Rickie leaves his natural habitat to marry the devastatingly practical Agnes Pembroke, who brings with her — as a sort of dowry — a teaching position at the abominable Sawston School.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Painful Novel
Review: Forster's The Longest Journey is painfully bad: painfully awkward, painfully closeted, painfully dated, painfully class-conscious, painfully defiant of the norms of story-telling, painfully sententious at times and preachy. It's also painfully true.

It's a "college" novel, like many others depicting the lives of its characters fatally determined by the inherently contingent friendships one forms in the nursery of one's college circle. I read it first in 1962, when I was living in painful intimacy with my "peers" in a painfully cloistered House at a painfully famous university. I suppose I had to write a painfully trivial paper about it. Now I've read it again, and I find that, seen backwards through the telescope of years, it's uproariously funny. I don't remember having that impression the first time. I imagine I found it more serious when I was living in it.

I wonder why novels of the early 20th C seem so much more dated and mawkish at times than, for instance, Trollope or Fielding or Smollett? Perhaps it's the embarrassment that teenagers feel about their parents when those parents claim to have been young once and reveal the turmoils that only the current generation can take seriously. Anyway, I suspect that many readers will underrate this novel because of that uneasiness. All I can say is, if you're not reading it for homework, nobody will make you enjoy it. But if you give it a chance, you may find that it's painfully moving and beautiful.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Beguiling but gloomy
Review: I find Forster an engaging and compelling writer. His novels often become absorbing despite flat passages and parts that, for me at least, are bordering on the unacceptable - the actions and thoughts of characters sometimes seem contrary to behaviour that seems at all natural to me.

I missed the sense of the exotic in this novel that I got from 'A Passage to India' and 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' - and yet the world of the priveleged in the UK and the cloisters of Cambridge University are exotic for me. It's just that they are so gloomy in this novel - gloomy and troubled. Even the countryside is blighted by the freight trains that repeatedly claim lives as they tramp the landscape.

This novel also has melodramatic elements that stretched my sense of credibility, however revelations of surprises are wonderfully managed. While my thoughts were heading in the right direction with the major revelation, when it did come it brought a true 'aha!' feeling - it made so much sense and yet I, like the characters in the story, had not seen it coming.

But, perhaps for me, the most disappointing aspect of this novel is its attitude towards the 'disadvantaged'. As in the movie 'Edward Scissorhand' the 'distorted' person, while capable of receiving small 'gifts of love' (as Morike put it - see Hugo Wolf's song 'Verborgenheit') it seems from these views of life that the realistic approach to the 'distorted' is that they are incapable of true happiness or fulfilment. This is a view I certainly don't subscribe to.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Modernist Makes it Personal
Review: The Longest Journey's suspicious form and strange conclusions were quite accurately detected by Lionel Trilling who declared this novel in comparison to Forster's others to be his least perfect, least compact, least precisely formed and, simultaneously, his most brilliant, most dramatic, and most passionate. Such a multi-faceted existence is an exact indication of the risky and unfamiliar lines upon which modernists walked. One can assume that Trilling considered A Passage to India to be the wiser and more perfect of Forster's novels in comparison. Where A Passage to India is socio-political, The Longest Journey is personal. The philosophical issues portrayed can be interpreted as being in dialogue with Forster's fellow scholars, pontificating upon the arguments of his academic circles. Scholars who engaged with these same philosophical arguments will no doubt warm to the affable and ironical gestures Forster uses to argue his case.

The structure in which Forster composes The Longest Journey sometimes borders on an obsessive control of the novel's plot and particularly the characters. As the events of the story unfold, we see the frame leading us to a central statement about the human condition. The overemphasis of these points crowded with immense symbolism leads us to question the effectiveness of Forster's statements. Particular points in the story, such as Rickie's realisation that Stephen is his half brother and the reintroduction of Ansell teamed with Stephen, leave us in a troublesome position asking whether this highly personal story was sacrificed to the musically fluent style Forster was working. The Longest Journey's most difficult problem is that it introduces itself as a modernist novel whose commitment is to style, yet its story is obviously Forster's personal account of a series of emotions and events in his own life.

The narrator's voice and Rickie's are essentially interchangeable. The only difference between the two is that the narrator is consciously aware of what Rickie's subconscious knows, but can't admit. If Rickie were so closely intertwined with the authorial voice, then it would seem that there is no room for intimacy with the reader. Yet, the story redeems itself through Rickie's struggle because it is so personal in its metaphysical complications. It is only later in the story, as it drifts farther away from Rickie's consciousness that the emotional impact lets go and we are left wandering through labyrinths of overt symbolic designs. The design in which Rickie is brought to his end is ultimately unfulfilling because the tragedy of the human condition makes itself so poignantly clear when the story is brought full circle to the ending ominously predicted from the outset. Instead, we are asked to accept that no life is tragic because of the enduring factor a human's spiritual hope. If Stephen were created as a character more complicated than a pastoral hero, then this resolution might be effective. However, in the troublesome structure it exists in, it falls short of an enlightening resolution.

Within the complex faults that unfold from an authorial voice inseparable from a central character's consciousness, there is a meaning that resounds through. Apart from stylistic concerns, the modernists were intensely concerned about the human's existential crisis that results from an awareness of the bleak resistance to have faith in either scientific or theological assertions. Rickie is the only vehicle with which we can understand and interpret the complicity of an early twentieth century man's reality. The other characters exist as mere paper figures that serve stilted plot functions. It is through Rickie alone that we understand this particular metaphysical crisis. These sentiments are what make The Longest Journey an important work of modernist fiction in the historical sense. Its theoretical importance lies in the fact of its mismatched structural and sentimental tale's existence.

There is an odd coincidence between symbols he and other modernist writers use. For example, Rickie hangs a towel over a painted harp in the room he is sleeping in at Ansell's house just as Woolf wrote about Mrs. Ramsay hanging her shawl over the skull hanging in the children's bedroom. The symbolic meaning of this can be interpreted in various ways. Yet, in Woolf's writing the meaning makes itself abundantly more clear because the style with which she works supersedes the story in To the Lighthouse. This is why To the Lighthouse is a more successful modernist experiment. A writer that does not work within the laws of the form in which they are working will inevitably fail in their efforts. Forster does not seem to be ignorant of these laws, but he is so enthusiastic about the application of them that his obsessive use of the stylistics becomes rather inappropriate.

Forster often declaimed himself as "not a great novelist". The reason he felt this was probably because he was not able to abide by the standards that he himself set as the qualifications for great novels. This is, at least, the primary objection to be made toward The Longest Journey. In Aspects of the Novel Forster writes, "The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results". The obsessive control of style as an opposition to the driving story he wanted to tell in The Longest Journey proves to be a fatal merging of a novelist who wants to keep with the artistic innovations of his time. Forster is too aware of his use of stylistic method to make the novel a wholly satisfactory piece of literature. Yet, because there is so much of Forster in the novel, it remains a very interesting book to serious and passionate readers.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: Philosophers should enjoy this one. The story is about coming to grips about who you are, expectations and perceptions. This book can be insightful for some, but for me, a little dry. Forster did not foster a logical basis for Rickie to fall in love - or a hopeless romantic one for that matter. From there, the story lost steam.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Social commentary and metaphor
Review: Like all Forster's novels, the plot of 'The Longest Journey' is secondary to the underlying themes - the new 'mechanical' society that Forster hated, being true to yourself and class structure. It's not the kind of book you pick up in an airport - it's thought provoking and wonderfully written.

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