Elliot had dubbed him Rickie because he was rickety, that he took pleasure in alluding to his son’s deformity, and was sorry that it was not more serious than his own.” “He was never told anything, but he discovered for himself that his father and mother did not love each other, and that his mother was lovable. Rickie is treated cruelly by his father (partly because he is lame and that “weakness” reminds his father of his own weakness) and supported by his mother, but ultimately left to grow up alone, struggling to make sense of relationships though having been surrounded by unhappy ones. The Longest Journey does take readers back that hundred years and one can certainly see the similarities between young men of today and Forster’s young men of long ago. He writes: “If one were to go back a hundred years, the clothing would no doubt be different but the young men would be much the same, the ritual much the same, as if this were a certain thing that people do in a certain society, as if this were the way it should be.” When I started reading The Longest Journey, I was reading Keith Oatley’s novel, Therefore Choose, which also opens with a scene at Cambridge.
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