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.

Contents

[edit] History

The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not... (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and The Last Post (1928). The compilation was ranked at number 57 on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list.[1]

[edit] Plot

The novel chronicles 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. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. Much of the novel is spent following Tietjens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

[edit] Literary notes

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 constructs a protagonist 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 the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity with a deftness unachieved by Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Arnold Zweig or Jules Romains. Only Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time (1927) arguably surpasses Ford's achievement in marrying historical events to psychological nuance.

[edit] Critical notes

Graham Greene wrote [2] 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 disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Modern Library
  2. ^ "The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford", Volume 3 (1963), Introduction.