Parade's End (Everyman's Library)

by Ford Madox Ford

Hardcover, 1992

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Series

Parade's End (1-4)

Genres

Publication

Everyman's Library (1992), Hardcover, 906 pages

Description

"First published as four separate novels, Parade's End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine."--P. [4] of cover.

Media reviews

Observer

I think it could be argued that Last Post was more than a mistake – it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End. The sentimentality which sometimes lurks in the shadow of Christopher Tietjens, the last Tory (Ford sometimes seems to be writing

about ‘the last English gentleman’), emerged there unashamed... This is a better book, a thousand times, when it ends in the confusion of Armistice Night 1918 – the two lovers united, it is true, but with no absolute certainties about the past so deformed by Sylvia’s lies (if they are lies) or about the future with that witch-wife still awaiting them there... Parade’s End is not a war-book in the ordinary sense of the term; true, it was produced from the experiences of 1914-18, but while a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front confined its horror to the physical, to the terrors of the trenches, so that it is even possible to think of such physical terrors as an escape for some from the burden of thought and mental pain, Ford turned the screw. Here there was no escape from the private life.

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Saturday Review

Many critics down the years have pointed out that almost all anti-war novels and movies are in fact pro-war. Blood and mud and terror and rape and an all-pervading anxiety are precisely what is attractive about war — in the safety of fiction — to those who, in our overprotected lives, are

suffering from tedium vitae and human self-alienation. In Parade’s End Ford makes war nasty, even to the most perverse and idle... Graham Greene once said of Parade’s End that it was the only adult novel dealing with the sexual life that has been written in English. This is a startling superlative, but it may well be true. Certainly the book has a scope and depth, a power and complexity quite unlike anything in modern fiction, and still more unusual, it is about mature people in grown-up situations, written by a thoroughly adult man.

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brewingfaith.com

Parades End has been called the last Victorian novel. And I suppose it is. So much that is Victorian is in this book, and yet… there is something of the lost generation in here also. It is in my mind a transitional novel, the last hurrah of the Victorian and a first tentative peek at the modern.

Or more properly perhaps, the first description of the Modern by a Victorian: “No more hope, no more glory, not for the nation, not for the world I dare say, no more parades.” Those who have read The Good Soldier will recognize some familiar themes, but in Parade’ End will enjoy Ford at his most expansive. Why Ford has fallen so out of favor, and this novel in particular has been all but forgotten, is one of those peculiarities of taste and time. Ford himself once said, “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal; the very best and the very worst.” It is certain that Parade’s End belongs in the former class. Certainly it will again be “rediscovered” by some generation of writers. It’s quality and execution demand it.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member yarb

Masterly evocation of the Great War and the upheaval in British society which accompanied it. The POV drifts and weaves from first to third person, time is dilated, layer on impressionist layer is daubed, until Ford's subject is embedded in the very marrow of the reader.

Every character is

sumptuously drawn, every chain of thought is as natural, as solid and as wildly intricate as a spiderweb. This book is an aching lament with moments of roguish, cocksure humour.

Half star knocked off for the marginal drop in perfection of Book IV.

More ellipsis and exclamation marks per page than any other book.

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LibraryThing member jwhenderson

“At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one

matter at least…. Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades…. Don’t you see how symbolical it was—the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades?… For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country…nor for the world, I dare say… None… Gone… Napoo finny! No…more…parades!”

Ford Madox Ford made his reputation as a novelist on the war & peace themes. The Good Soldier (1915) is his most famous, and is on several different ‘Best 100 Novels of the Century’ lists, as is his four-part Parade's End. The latter book was recently in the news, Tom Stoppard having just completed his adaptation for BBC television, the mini-series scheduled to air in 2011. This novel reminds me of other great chronicles of individual lives and war, in this case a chronicle of the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. While this is generally considered a "war" novel it is unique in the way Ford has Tietjens' consciousness taking primacy over the war-events like a filter. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one aspect of his life, and not always even the most prominent though he is in the middle of it. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity. The result is a modern literary project that rivals those of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or, more aptly, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.

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LibraryThing member thorold

Although it did get a BBC dramatisation a year or two ago, and it will presumably get a boost from the World War One centenary industry in 2014, this does somehow seem to have become the most neglected of the great British war novels. Unfairly, of course, because it is clearly one of the great

modern novels in English. Or is it one of the great Edwardian novels? It's a tricky book to categorise: thoroughly experimental in its form, but utterly conservative in its themes. Or remarkably advanced in its subject-matter and amazingly traditional in its language... you can almost read it any way you choose.

What I expected when I started reading this was something a bit like what Evelyn Waugh does in Brideshead and the war trilogy, an account of the brutality of war smashing up everything that was decent and English and gentlemanly and plunging us all into the Age of Hooper. The frequent image of Tietjens as "the last Tory" leads us in this direction, but you probably oversimplify what Ford is trying to do if you read it like that.

Tietjens is never identified with the pre-War generation, or even with the Victorian age: Ford always locates him spiritually in 17th-century England. Ford frequently tells us that in an ideal world, Tietjens should have been a saintly Anglican poet-priest like George Herbert at Bemerton. But Herbert didn't exactly spend his life in bucolic tranquillity: he was an MP before he became a parson. The England of his day was fizzing with every possible kind of political and theological dissent, and erupted into revolution and civil war only a few years after Herbert's death. (And, of course, the first use of the term "Tory" in English politics was much later, in the 1660s.)

So we obviously shouldn't take what Ford says about Englishness entirely at face value. The opening section of the tetralogy shows us an England that is hideously smug and self-satisfied, with the Suffragettes (and the appallingly self-centred Sylvia) the only people prepared to give it a poke and stir it into some sort of life.

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LibraryThing member madmouth

Though in the swing of some monumental historical events, this is not exactly a novel in which things occur. It's an obsessively detailed, crushed-flat-against-the-window-of-the-car trip through the characters' innermost, intimate minds. I found Ford's protagonists, prose style and and thematic

windings unique, compelling and inimitable; I will read this book for the rest of my life.
I can understand not wanting to sit through it, however. It's binds the reader to one of the most idiosyncratic human psyches ever written up.

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LibraryThing member Rocky_Wing

this book at it's best a non-linear, psychological puzzle of sorts. at it's worst a drawn out epic leaving little delight for at least this reader. to say that i hated every paragraph would be a gross overstatement. there is much to appreciate including the tension filled love pseudo-triangle

between christopher, sylvia, and valentine. the author is unafraid to fully drench the reader inside each character's soul, to excavate even the basest of thoughts and motives. this sort of honesty in literature is to be commended. the beginning of each section is like waking up from a dream in a strange bedroom. you never know where you are, what is going on, what has happened previous. only slowly does the author reveal these things. all that said, this novel lacked so much that i appreciate in literature. it didn't draw me in as so many authors do. i approached the book each time as a duty instead of a joy and by the end it was a final push just to finish it. can i pinpoint any general reason? everything sounds so superficial so i leave it at this. some authors strike a note with certain people in not only what they say but in how they say it. from the first page to the last this ear never found the note that ford was pounding.

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LibraryThing member Carol_Sykes

Long, psychologically accurate and sometimes confusing. You feel like you're really getting to know real people but from a comfortable distance, which is a blessing since what happens to them is unpleasant in places.

LibraryThing member booklovers2

April 2013 Book Club Read - and what a read it was! As much as it was difficult to read (and I believe due to the language of the times) It was just as enjoyable - A sense of accomplishment was definitely felt after the completion of this adventure.

LibraryThing member jmoncton

I picked this up because it is described as an epic tale of the impact of WW I on an upper class British family and I was hoping for a combination of Downton Abbey and The Forsyte Saga. But the book uses an interesting style in telling the story - a bit of stream of consciousness narrative from a

few of the main characters. Although there are points in this book where the style works brilliantly, too often the characters are thinking about mundane things - 'will anyone notice the rip in my shirt?' 'Are the scones cooked enough?' And that style might be fine for a book like Mrs. Dalloway where it's only the events of a day, but this book focuses on the Great War and the impact it has on one family. There are much bigger events going on - people getting killed or maimed, families totally devastated - and the style of telling these stories seemed too random or haphazard. This book is long - 38 hours in audio - and you would think that all that time with these characters would make you have strong feelings for or against them, but I finished the book with a feeling of ambivalence - not really caring about any of the people in this book.

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LibraryThing member JVioland

A brilliant British aristocrat officer's life during WWI without delving into the battles of war but instead the battles between him and his love interests. Very well written and engaging. One becomes immersed in this world.

LibraryThing member missizicks

On the front cover of the edition I borrowed from the library, there's a quote from a review in The Guardian that says "The finest English novel about the Great War". This might well be true. Ford Madox Ford certainly pulls no punches when it comes to revealing the idiotic decisions made in

Whitehall about the war, nor when it comes to describing the pointless loss of life and the psychological damage inflicted on soldiers at the front. But it's more than a war novel. It's also a description of how horrible the upper classes can be to each other within the weirdness of their social structure that puts saving face and gaining revenge against perceived wrongs above trying to understand each other in order to be happy. It's also about gender politics and presents a bleak view of the differences, similarities and incompatibilities between men and women. I didn't like a single person in the book, but I found their stories compellingly written. There's a dark humour buried in the book, as well. Satirical rather than gallows. Ford allows both Tietjens and Sylvia to develop a sense of the ridiculous as the war and their tortured marriage both roll on, making wry comment on the bureaucracy of the military and society's demand for decorum. The structure of the book is interesting, told in parts that focus on the perceptions of one of the three key characters. We gain hints of events happening to the other characters, as observed by the person we are with, and then in a later section we find out what happened. It means the timeline jumps around a bit, but it also allows the reader to draw their own conclusions which are then either confirmed or challenged. It's too long and too repetitive to read as a single piece, though. It should be read as individual books, with gaps in between, as it was originally published. The brain needs respite from unrelenting misery. Overall, it's an ugly book containing little in the way of joy and plenty in the way of petty hatreds. It feels like an achievement to have ground my way through it.

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LibraryThing member Kristelh

Reason read: 1001 Q1 read 2023
This is a story of the breakdown of a culture and the emergence of a new world and new values. It is told through a love triangle; but there are no passion scenes. It is a war story without a battle and tragedy without denouement. The result of war on participants and

society. It chronicles the life ofa member of English gentry before, during and after WWI. Characters are well developed and it is mostly a character study. A parade is a line of people/vehicle moving through a public place to celebrate a day or event.
Christopher Teetjens is the last Tory
Sylvia is a flippant, promiscuous, mean hearted woman
Valentine is a pacifist, suffraget

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