The Longest Journey

By: E.M. Forster

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

In this searching tragicomedy of manners, personalities, and world views, E.M. Forster explores the "idea of England" he would later develop in Howards 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.

Out of this misalliance comes Forster's most stylistically daring novel. As it follows Rickie from the comforts of Cambridge to the petty intrigues of Sawston to the lush, haunted environs of rural Wiltshire, The Longest Journey gives us a comic yet immensely moving vision of a country split between pragmatism and imagination, sober conformity and redemptive eccentricity, upright Christianity and delirious paganism.

(P)1907

Narrator does her best with deeply turgid prose

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Hard to say -perhaps Miss Prism from "The Importance of Being Earnest"?

What could E.M. Forster have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

It's an awful book full of horrible people. It is very much a period piece but it is difficult to believe there was ever a time when people were so pretentious, snobbish and melodramatic; Forster is terribly earnest and all his characters take themselves incredibly seriously. My advice would have been to lighten up.

Have you listened to any of Wanda McCaddon’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

The narrator is not Wanda McCaddon but Nadine Rea. She does her best, but the material is awful; it also seems odd to have a female narrate a book where most of the characters are male, and in the end means that she can't do much to distinguish the voices from each other.

What character would you cut from The Longest Journey?

God, all of them. Ricky is the central character and unspeakably tedious, so ultimately I'd have to cut him.

Any additional comments?

I was just very disappointed in this, having enjoyed other works by Forster. It was for my book club so I felt like I needed to make it all the way through, and I feel sorry for the narrator, but it's a pretentious, naive, self-important and very tedious book full of narrow-minded, histrionic and deeply unpleasant people. I can see why it hasn't achieved the success of his other books, and can only be grateful that even Merchant Ivory didn't think it worth filming.

Forster, not at his best

I am a great fan of E.M. Forster's novels. I would not recommend this one very highly, however. The book, as a whole, is slow moving, particularly the first quarter of it. I found the book more interesting when the main character, Ricky makes his bad marriage, reconnects with his aunt, and discovers that he has a half-brother. Apart from the slow pace, I found the book rather difficult to follow a number of times. There are shifts of time and place that are not clearly described, but rather left for the listener to infer. There are a lot of interesting characters in this novel. I wish the story had been presented better. Nadia May's narration is superb but does not fully save this audiobook.

Utter drivel

Is there anything you would change about this book?

Yes, the insipid main character.

What was most disappointing about E.M. Forster???s story?

The story was sappy, convoluted, lame and interminable. I have enjoyed a number of E.M. Forster's novels, particularly A Passage to India and A Room With a View, but this was very disappointing. It just went on and on with characters it was hard to care about.

What does Nadia May bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

She's a fine reader, just had bad material.

Could you see The Longest Journey being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

I suppose a ruthless editor and a great director could make a movie out of this.

Might be called The Longest Read

I do love Forster’s writing, and this novel is beautifully written in certain ways. However, I agree with another review, and I believe this could be called “the longest read” because I thought I would never come to the end of it. In some ways, it does feel like 75% of the book to 85% was setting the scene which I understand as a writer myself. I chose to listen to this because I like to start with the earliest writings and move forward in time. I started this with Lawrence Darrell, whose early novels were also very difficult to slog through but also very beautiful in some parts. I believe this would’ve been an entirely different novel if Forster was not an author in the closet but that is left for speculation and history. I gave it all the stars because nobody writes like this anymore and it’s well worth reading to remember where the English language came from.