Customer Reviews

The Longest Journey

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

The Longest Journey can be difficult to get into, but is worth the effort. Set at the end of the Victorian period in England, it follows the character of Rickie Elliot from his Cambridge days through various attempts to find happiness and fulfillment in life. It helps to know a little about British society to fully understand each character's actions. The fascinating thing about the novel is that there isn't a single character that you can pinpoint as good or bad -- like real people, the characters lie and put on false fronts. It's fun to discover just who Rickie's friends and relatives really are. Characters like Agnes, who Rickie loves, and Mrs. Failing, his relative, make some great points about women in society. Although this book is primarily a "novel of manners" like Jane Austen would write, there are several exciting plot twists, including a surprise ending. If you enjoy books by authors like Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, try The Longest Journey.

Edward Morgan Forster expressed his special partiality for this particular book regretting that it was never as popular as "The Room with a View". It seems, however, that his readers knew better choosing either the lighter Italian novels or later works such as "Howards End" or "A Passage to India".
Forster's partiality is comprehensible when we try to read the book through his biography. On the one hand he is able to reveal here his long-term infatuation with a fellow student and go back to his university adventures. On the other hand he uses his craft to draw for himself a life he would have had he decided to become straight. The image is far from pleasant - becoming straight means being imprisoned in a hapless marriage for which the hero has to pay with his academic career. It is an unhappy life which ends in an accidental death.
This is an important novel in Forster's oeuvre and if you were attracted by others you should by all means proceed to "The Longest Journey". Still, a modern reader will gasp many a time while reading the novel. It wouldn't be fair to reveal too much but just let me draw your attention to one fact. Forster apparently finds dealing with his cast of characters a bit too much so they disappear one by one... as a result of sudden deaths. When Gerald is "broken" on a football pitch you gasp, but when you have drowning, heart attack, deathly cold and train accident and so on you can't help smiling.

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.

Edward Morgan Forster expressed his special partiality for this particular book regretting that it was never as popular as "The Room with a View". It seems, however, that his readers knew better choosing either the lighter Italian novels or later works such as "Howards End" or "A Passage to India".
Forster's partiality is comprehensible when we try to read the book through his biography. On the one hand he is able to reveal here his long-term infatuation with a fellow student and go back to his university adventures. On the other hand he uses his craft to draw for himself a life he would have had he decided to become straight. The image is far from pleasant - becoming straight means being imprisoned in a hapless marriage for which the hero has to pay with his academic career. It is an unhappy life which ends in an accidental death.
This is an important novel in Forster's oeuvre and if you were attracted by others you should by all means proceed to "The Longest Journey". Still, a modern reader will gasp many a time while reading the novel. It wouldn't be fair to reveal too much but just let me draw your attention to one fact. Forster apparently finds dealing with his cast of characters a bit too much so they disappear one by one... as a result of sudden deaths. When Gerald is "broken" on a football pitch you gasp, but when you have drowning, heart attack, deathly cold and train accident and so on you can't help smiling.

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.

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.

There seems a little bit of everything in English fiction in E. M. Forster's "The Longest Journey": A university coming-of-age story like "Brideshead Revisited", a pastoral idyll like "Far From The Madding Crowd", a subterranean human bond between men like "The Secret Sharer," a lost-child parable like "Silas Marner." At least stylistically, it's pretty impressive.

Rickie Elliot is a sensitive young man studying at Cambridge when the novel begins, a kind of dreamer with means. He wishes to be a writer, but longs for a human connection absent from his life since his loving mother died. A sudden death presents him with what he thinks is that connection in a woman named Agnes, but after their marriage he discovers his void is not so easy to fill.

Forster's 1907 novel starts out in a rather light and merry vein, poking fun at the philosophies of its various characters right from the start as Rickie and a group of his fellow undergraduates debate the existence of a theoretical cow his best friend Ansell insists is real because "I have proved it to myself." When Rickie goes off to marry Agnes, Ansell takes a dim view of the affair, refusing to so much as say hello to the woman and telling Rickie he disapproves because "1) She is not serious. 2) She is not truthful." So impractical is Ansell that he even decides to make philosophy a full-time career.

The joke was on me, however. Ansell's advice turns out to be correct. The second half of the novel, after a sudden and tragic turn, becomes the passionately serious tale of Rickie extricating himself from a world of mindless conformity and convention to pursue the life of a committed aesthete and regaining Ansell's respect.

Like I said, you seem to get several novels at once in this book. Some of it is marvelous. The story moves well, and the narrative is rich in descriptive delights. Early on, in the lighter half, we meet Rickie's wonderfully horrible aunt, a woman who ascribes the selflessness of others to their inherent dullness and is described as a "cold-eyed" character from Ibsen "who did not mind giving other people a chill provided it was not infectious." In the grim later section, Forster writes of "the cruelty of Nature, to whom our refinement and piety are but as bubbles, hurrying downwards on the turbid waters. They break, and the stream continues."

It's not just the plot that changes, but the characters. Ansell goes from shrill pendant to honorable prophet, while Agnes morphs from gentle if shallow to thoroughly vile. At one point, Forster tells us she suffers most from having a husband who fails to "keep her in line." Reading "The Longest Journey," I felt myself in the hands of a very talented but confused young writer, not sure what affect he was after as he moved from chapter to chapter. Rickie's dilemma in the novel is carving out something of substance from what is more clearly a transient existence. My own problem was figuring out what point Forster was driving at and why I should care.

In the end, I didn't feel any of the characters existed as more than philosophical constructs, whether it was Rickie romancing Agnes with a story of a woman who turned into a tree or his debating Ansell about that cow. This was okay enough in the beginning, when the mood was lighter, but once Forster broke out the violins I felt more of a strain and an effort keeping up. The emotional resonance was not there.

I liked the book for the beauty of its prose and for the way it worked off-and-on, even in the second half which contains some fine philosophic ruminations about the nature of life. It doesn't quite gel as a story, but it broods very well and stays lively enough to keep you both reading and thinking. Not a waste, but not something that makes me want to read more Forster.

The story and the writing seem to be both odd and at times difficult to follow. The latter is probably due to the age of the novel. It is however a very good novel and well worth the read.

I love the character development in this and all of the Forster novels. It is slow to take shape but eventually it really comes through and is vivid.