The Longest Journey -- E. M. Forster

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Condition : Good.

      Edward Arnold, 1947, Vintage Hardback - Classics - 320 pp.

       The Longest Journey is a bildungsroman by E. M. Forster, first published in 1907. 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.

       Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and congenitally lame young man, orphaned at the age of 15, escapes from the misery of suburban life and the bullying of public school to Cambridge, where, like Forster himself, he finds sympathetic friends, chief amongst them Ansell, a grocer's son. He has literary aspirations (his short stories, Arcadian pastoral fantasies, are remarkably like Forster's own), but is also attracted by Agnes Pembroke, the conventional but beautiful sister of a schoolmaster friend and protector, and by her handsome, athletic, ex-bully fiancé Gerald.

       Like all of E. M. 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 oneself and class structure. 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. Characters like Agnes, who Rickie loves, and Mrs. Failing, his relative, make some great points about women in society. Though "The Longest Journey" is primarily a "novel of manners" like Jane Austen would write, there are several exciting plot twists, including a surprise ending.

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