Parade's End

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Parade's End is a tetralogy (four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a life vividly depicted in the novels. The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not... (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928).

The novel chronicles the life its hero Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a government-employed statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. Much of the novel is spent with Tietjens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

Almost uniquely among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Building on his use of the device of the unreliable narrator in The Good Soldier (1915), Ford shows you a character for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after it, part of Ford's genius is to place an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity unachieved by Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Arnold Zweig or Jules Romains. Only Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time (1927) exceeds Ford's success in marrying historical events to psychological nuance.

Graham Greene wrote ^[1] that Last Post "was an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written. Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake--it was a disaster, a disater which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End."