“Parade’s End”, by Ford Madox Ford

 

906 pages, BBC Books, ISBN-13: 978-1849904933

Officially, this omnibus edition of Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford is a companion piece to the BBC’s 2012 adaptation of his original tetralogy (how’s that for a 5¢ word); that’s Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens on the cover. The four books consists of Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up – (1926) and Last Post (1928). Ford, born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer, started writing under this…interesting pen name in 1919 because, in his, words, “a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable”, and in order to fulfil the terms of a small legacy; it was also useful to avoid lawsuits from his wife, Elsie, in the event of his new companion, Stella, becoming the next Mrs. Hueffer (she didn’t). Incidentally, he also taught at Michigan’s Olivet College for a time in the 1930s. Cool, right?

So anyway, Parade’s End follows one Christopher Tietjens, “the last Tory”, a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family, before, during and after World War I; the novels are set principally in England and on the Western Front of the First World War, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts in the books. Two other characters (among so many others) are central to the story, one being Sylvia Tietjens, née Satterthwaite, his promiscuous and self-centered socialite wife who married Christopher knowing that she was already pregnant (possibly by another man), and the freethinking, suffragette and pacifist Valentine Wannop who is torn between idealism for her causes and her attraction to Christopher, even as she disdains all that he stands for.

Ford allows each of his characters to describe themselves through their inner monologues – and brother, can these people talk. The stream of verbiage, both in their heads and out of their mouths, is virtually non-stop as they make observations about themselves, their companions, the world at large – I mean, everything. Not that any of it is poorly written; each character’s personality shines through in their self-revealing soliloquies. But I often found myself putting the book down just to catch my breath. Unique among war novels of the time, Tietjens’ consciousness takes primacy over the war it filters, as Ford created a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent, even though he is in the middle of it. And his insight into himself and the world about him is there for all to see on the page.

Ford attempted to situate this grand world-wide cataclysm within an English societal situation, showing how both high and low were irrevocably changed, both before and after the war. We see how the upper classes didn’t (as far as I could tell) seem to be much affected, with many coming off as insufferable gossips and hypocrites with their poor judgment concerning the war being quite appalling; the returning veterans of the lower orders, meanwhile, are shown as having been discounted by their “betters” to the point of being unwelcome bothers. I have read elsewhere that this is a “Modernist” book, but I read no Joyce or Proust in these lines: the plot is clear and straightforward, and while Joyce’s stream of consciousness is ungrammatical and hard to follow, Ford’s is anything but as his characters blossom as they speak.

I thought that Parade’s End had a rather lyrical quality to it, to say nothing of melancholic – well, how could it not, seeing as it is a record of how European civilization committed mass-suicide between 1914 and 1918, only to have a series of dark phoenixes of unimaginable evil and cruelty arise from its ashes. But while the Big Picture problems of politics, philosophy, faith and so on are important, Ford reminds us of the little people who fought and suffered so that these deep thoughts could survive or, just as likely, die. It is a long book, and the dense floridity of speech can be off-putting and even intimidating at times. But stick to it, Dear Reader, for by the time you reach the conclusion of Parade’s End you will have taken part in the resurrection of a dead world and been present as it is buried all over again. Triumphant and tragic – the human condition.