Parade's End

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful book which i found hard to put down.
Review: at first tietjens seems too good to be true, but soon he is a tragic hero, and this long book becomes an obsession.

Rating:
Summary: A tragedy of change, well told
Review: Ford Madox Ford wrote prolifically, with a repertoire which experimented with style, character and narrative across a variety of settings and subject matters. Ford's Parade's End is among the very best of his works. The centerpiece, Christopher Tietjens, seems on the surface to represent a now-commonplace theme in English literature--the "last English gentleman" metaphorically swept away by modernity in the aftermath of the First World War. The first of this set of novels, "Some Do Not", features an opening passage which is laced with brilliant satire, crystal-clear character development, and a style which is utterly accessible and utterly enchanting. Through the rest of this novel, and well into the next volume, Ford seems to be telling a straightforward "passing of the noble old things" story. But Ford Madox Ford is rarely so straightforward, and these novels are no exception. What seems to begin as a mere bemoaning of a passing age turns into a demonstration of the inevitability, and even the desirability of its passing. Although Ford creates a perfect foil to Tietjens to apparently illustrate the vulgarity and superficiality of the modern age, things are not so simple. Tietjens views his world as irreparably fading, but Ford understands that Tietjens' world may never have existed at all. Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers novel cycle both try to show the passing of "old England" and the marching in of modernity. Neither Snow nor Galsworthy, though each is wonderful, does as much with narrative style as Ford does here. Ford's novels seem to take a simpler approach to the topic by creating Tietjens, the representative of the "old order", and his wife Sylvia, the representative of the "new", but by the time that the plot is worked out, the reader comes to understand that Ford has created a hall of mirrors and metaphors, and nothing is as simple as it seems.

This is one of the great must-reads of 20th C. English literature. It's a shame that it's not required Brit lit reading in every college survey.

Rating:
Summary: A tragedy of change, well told
Review: Ford Madox Ford wrote prolifically, with a repertoire which experimented with style, character and narrative across a variety of settings and subject matters. Ford's Parade's End is among the very best of his works. The centerpiece, Christopher Tietjens, seems on the surface to represent a now-commonplace theme in English literature--the "last English gentleman" metaphorically swept away by modernity in the aftermath of the First World War. The first of this set of novels, "Some Do Not", features an opening passage which is laced with brilliant satire, crystal-clear character development, and a style which is utterly accessible and utterly enchanting. Through the rest of this novel, and well into the next volume, Ford seems to be telling a straightforward "passing of the noble old things" story. But Ford Madox Ford is rarely so straightforward, and these novels are no exception. What seems to begin as a mere bemoaning of a passing age turns into a demonstration of the inevitability, and even the desirability of its passing. Although Ford creates a perfect foil to Tietjens to apparently illustrate the vulgarity and superficiality of the modern age, things are not so simple. Tietjens views his world as irreparably fading, but Ford understands that Tietjens' world may never have existed at all. Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers novel cycle both try to show the passing of "old England" and the marching in of modernity. Neither Snow nor Galsworthy, though each is wonderful, does as much with narrative style as Ford does here. Ford's novels seem to take a simpler approach to the topic by creating Tietjens, the representative of the "old order", and his wife Sylvia, the representative of the "new", but by the time that the plot is worked out, the reader comes to understand that Ford has created a hall of mirrors and metaphors, and nothing is as simple as it seems.

This is one of the great must-reads of 20th C. English literature. It's a shame that it's not required Brit lit reading in every college survey.

Rating:
Summary: A truly great novel of moral and suffering
Review: Having read Ford's absolutely brilliantly wrought little novel "The good soldier", and having read the terrible review of Parade's End on Amazon.com, I didn't quite know what to expect when starting on this tetralogy. I am quite sure I wouldn't have liked it at all as a teenager, but as a man of forty years with a wrecked mariage behind me, I find this a deeply moving account of a man's grappling with profound moral issues of love, faithfulness, war and politics. It is set against the dramatic backdrop of WW1, where Ford himself served as an officer in a regiment just like Tietjens'. One may suspect that Ford has incorporated other elements of his own life in the plot, as he himself lived with three women in succession after leaving his wife, whom he never divorced. Ford's style of writing isn't exactly straightforward, and if you are accustomed only to Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum you may find it tedious reading. But my personal opinion is that Ford succeds in doing what his old buddy Conrad tried to do but never quite achieved, if you see what I mean... I do warmly recommend this book to the literate reader who wants to enjoy some truly great literature.

Rating:
Summary: a suggestion
Review: How I wish I could urge this enormous, engrossing, and satisfying novel on everyone who, for instance, loved Pat Barker's WWI Trilogy, or Ford's own THE GOOD SOLDIER, or Mary Renault's THE CHARIOTEER, or indeed anyone who cares about intricate characterization, a terrific love story, sweep and intricacy in serious fiction. The love story of Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop, and Tietjens monumental battle with his vicious wife Sylvia and all the British ruling class who prop her up, will enthrall you. Let the Ford Madox Ford revival begin!

Rating:
Summary: Ford's Last Readers
Review: I find it very sad that this great novel has again gone out of print, perhaps never to reappear after Everyman had to put it on remainder. Granted, as the reviews below note, it is written in an elliptical manner with time shifts, interior monologues as substitutions for action scenes and other moderist devices which make this book, like the Ulysses of Joyce, for instance, or Woolf's To the Lighthouse, God help us all, a challenge to the reader. And let's face it. Only critics like, or claim to like, a difficult book. Parade's End has never been a best seller; it has never been a modest seller. But behind the challenge is a heroic life given to us fearlessly, without irony or cynicism; a story that simultaneously beats on us and disintegrates before our eyes; and, built accretively, below our consciouness until the final novel, the tapestry of all the dross and glory of our own lives--all this the result in large part, no doubt, of these very modernist devices (while Lighthouse shows us that modernism can be an empty stage too). Tietjens stands with Adam Bede as one of the most memorable and noble characters in English literature. We care about him, which is exactly why the modernist style maddens us here--we need to know what happens to him, to be rushed to the finish. But Ford will not let us. We have to be pulled deep into Tietjens, to experience as our own all of his humiliations, to hold hard and unbending with him in intuitive dignity against the moral folly of others and the emptiness through which they are hurtled. Toward the end our reading slows. He is become our strength, our safe harbor; we cannot let him go. I know of no more powerful multi-volume work after Proust, not Musil, Powell, Durrell, etc., than Ford's Parades's End.

Rating:
Summary: Ford's Last Readers
Review: I find it very sad that this great novel has again gone out of print, perhaps never to reappear after Everyman had to put it on remainder. Granted, as the reviews below note, it is written in an elliptical manner with time shifts, interior monologues as substitutions for action scenes and other moderist devices which make this book, like the Ulysses of Joyce, for instance, or Woolf's To the Lighthouse, God help us all, a challenge to the reader. And let's face it. Only critics like, or claim to like, a difficult book. Parade's End has never been a best seller; it has never been a modest seller. But behind the challenge is a heroic life given to us fearlessly, without irony or cynicism; a story that simultaneously beats on us and disintegrates before our eyes; and, built accretively, below our consciouness until the final novel, the tapestry of all the dross and glory of our own lives--all this the result in large part, no doubt, of these very modernist devices (while Lighthouse shows us that modernism can be an empty stage too). Tietjens stands with Adam Bede as one of the most memorable and noble characters in English literature. We care about him, which is exactly why the modernist style maddens us here--we need to know what happens to him, to be rushed to the finish. But Ford will not let us. We have to be pulled deep into Tietjens, to experience as our own all of his humiliations, to hold hard and unbending with him in intuitive dignity against the moral folly of others and the emptiness through which they are hurtled. Toward the end our reading slows. He is become our strength, our safe harbor; we cannot let him go. I know of no more powerful multi-volume work after Proust, not Musil, Powell, Durrell, etc., than Ford's Parades's End.

Rating:
Summary: simply the best novel I've read in past decade
Review: I won't go into details re language, style, structure (see other readers' reviews)--this is simply the best novel I've read since I got through Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time."

Denis Jonnes
Kitakyushu, Japan

Rating:
Summary: This Book is Obscure For No Good Reason.
Review: One of the greatest books EVER written in the English language. Period. (Well, actually, it's four books, but they don't publish them separately anymore.) FMF is a modernist genius in the order of a Faulkner or a Woolf, with a beautiful style, incredibly human characters, and a mind-boggling knowledge of both the human heart and the physical world. FMF seems to be as quasi-omniscient as his noble last Tory, the main character, Christopher Tietjens. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that it's an easy book. Parade's End not a potboiler to read at the beach while you're getting a tan and sipping margaritas. It is a book that challenges the reader to let go of expectation and any hope of conventional structure, and to allow FMF's unique storytelling to settle into your gut slowly. It is a moral novel that doesn't moralize. A book about what it is to be good, to be a human being. FMF's beautiful style is even exceeded by his love for humanity and generosity of spirit. The sheer uncynicalness of the book--especially in this hollow, cynical age--is like a balm on this reader's eyes. This is one of those books, like Sound & The Fury, like Ulysses, like Pride & Prejudice, like Great Expectations, that EVERYONE should read.

Rating:
Summary: quietly sad and fully realized:
Review: Parade's End isn't the swiftest moving of epics. Comprised of what are supposed to be four seperate novels, it appears unlikely that any of the subsequent chapters in the story could stand alone. It is a powerful book, the story an inevitable tragedy, the results more of an afflication than anything truly humbling. The idea is very precise: tell of what could happen to a brutalized, perhaps incestually based feudal family of the ruling sort when confronted with the Modern Horror of the quick-paced, revolutionized ideas of the roving, buzzing, continually at war world.

The Age of the Teitjans is coming to an end--the age of the Old Rich and the Founding Fathers controlling and manipulating everything they come in contact with. The generation of today is gentle and much more soft--Freudian psychology and the threat or embrace of Socialism having done away with the undeniable hope that is the forces of Organized Religion. Women's Liberation, the freedom of serfs and of slaves and the rampant attack of the Colonialists on their governing masters has made a man like Christopher unable to side with anyone other than those most against his past. Parade's End is a story of the future--not just the future in the eyes of the past (this book was published in enstallments from 1924-1928), but the future of any generation of today following the end of a devastating World War. We hear tell of the moral degradation of a nation, of the changing expectations of the populace and the aroused suspicions of everyone, both those who fought in the war and are therefore accustomed to viewing others as hostile and those who remained at home or went abroad to escape the immediate consequences of a world gone mad with rage. Parade's End tells of exactly that: the end of the human celebration and, in the words of Ford's sometime friend and collaborator, seeing "even the most justifiable revolutions (being) prepared by personal impulses disguised into screeds." For, as even the elite wealthy must compete with the common man for sustinance, human nature inevitably takes over, with all its crude biases and sexual fixations, giving blood to politics and fostering a climate simply devouring itself for spite and for fun.

This book is a grand telling of the doom of empires. It is a story forever of the future as those of any age settling into an accustomed life start seeing the next generation foundering and no longer regret their own mistakes. Now they start to live in the memory of some distant and frequently misremembered past triumph. At the end I found myself struggling to remember my own name . . .