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 . . .
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