I recently finished The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster. The only other novel of his I had ever read was Maurice, which I picked up sometime in 2022 during my excursion with LGBTQ+ representation in period fiction. The Longest Journey was published in 1907 shortly after it was written, and it confirms all of my suspicions about Forster: he was absolutely brilliant, and not to mention hilarious.
The characters were incredibly real and convincing, and absurd at the same time, adding to the overall comedy of it. The beginning of the novel keeps you reading with its absurdity and wit, and the end of the novel keeps you reading like a train wreck you can't look away from.
The themes of the novel are so intricately webbed together they form a beautifully complex story. In the very beginning, the main theme is introduced--the young boys at Cambridge argue about whether or not the cow is real. It's a horribly confusing argument that makes no sense from any direction. But over the course of the story it begins to make sense. This is an incredible part of our main character's (Rickie) arc--to him, the argument by his best friend Stewart Ansell is also absurd and confusing. But as things start happening to him, as he grows older, he begins to understand exactly what he means.
In the beginning, Rickie has a black-and-white view of what is real and what isn't. Everything is real, because he is perceiving it, because it is tangible. He believes everything to be shallow and thus perceives all of these characters as who they are on the surface--he comes to understand their true depth along with the reader. Over the course of the plot, he is forced to discover for himself what is real and what isn't. He has to learn that the world is more complicated than he ever wanted it to be.
Each character is carefully crafted and has a surface level that contrasts with their inner self. Stephen, who is revealed in the most chaotic way to be Rickie's half brother, is hard, callous, and pretty simple on the surface. However, he reveals himself to be proud and by far the most loving, caring person of them all. Agnes, Rickie's wife, seems sweet and lovely and proper, but really turns out to be vindictive, scheming, and controlling.
Ansell is undoubtedly my favorite character in the novel. He is incredibly unconventional, and says anything he wants to at any point. His main value is keeping things real--he is honest to a fault, but only on the surface. Below the surface, he truly has a lot of feelings. He is brooding and nonchalant, pretending to brush things off but really letting everything sit until it all boils over.
The relationship Ansell maintains with Rickie throughout the novel could be the subject of another complete essay. They're extremely complicated and care so deeply about each other. They are separated for the long middle portion of the novel. Rickie thought he could get married, thought he loved Agnes, but it turned out not to be real. He had manufactured his love for her just as she had manufactured an entire life for the two of them, which he quickly grows to resent. She took pains to shut out everything that was real to him in order to keep them both in their fantasy world of upper class perfection. Rickie had to make the decision between the perfect life he was faking and the flawed, complicated life that was true and real to him. This was the dichotomy of Agnes and Ansell, both representing different lives he could have.
I thought at first that the ending was a little slow. After what seemed to be the climax, the falling action was extended and took up several years, but it proved to be worth it. It was a perfect setup for a more distant ending that tied things together and showed the reward, the ultimate payoff for Rickie choosing the cow that is real.
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