The Longest Journey

Not your conventional book about love or family, but tres fascinating all the same...

First of all, Rickie. Being the main character, we do expect him to be flawed, but not to such a great extent. His views on Agnes when he first meets her are fundamentally wrong. He thinks that, as a man, he is made to love everything, and so fixates his "love" onto Agnes, and, as is so common in these sorts of books, refuses to recognise her flaws. He also fails to acknowledge the flip side of a man's love, which is a woman's. According to Forster, a woman can only truly love one man throughout her lifetime; we see this played out in Agnes, and the two opposite concepts eventually cause disaster.

Being the reader, we recognise this and dramatic and tragic irony is immediately set up (don't blame me, I'm doing Romeo and Juliet at the moment in English, so all of these words are being ingrained in my being) and we immediately begin to pity Rickie, especially when the chapter about his family and upbringing comes around. His unloving father and his distant mother all have some part to play in the making of his character, but the main thing is his lame leg. It comes to define Rickie and essentially determine the course of his life (I promise I won't give anything away!)

A really really good one, I thoroughly recommend it! Next I'll be reading Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, although I'm not sure how good the translation is, but I'll let you know soon enough!