Parade's end (original 1925; edition 1979)

Opens a window on an interesting world. ( )

have ebook version - Parade's End was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. This extraordinary tetralogy centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman—“the last English Tory”—and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife, Sylvia.

The books:
Some Do Not
No More Parades
A Man Could Stand Up
The Last Post

Notes:
I originally uploaded the first three books as three separate files a couple of months ago. Since then I've obtained a copy of the fourth book, The Last Post, and decided to compile a single ebook containing all four books of this tetralogy.

The Parade's End tetralogy is the story of Christopher Tietjens, a younger son of the landed gentry whose upright morals seem to doom him to failure in a corrupt world. Tietjens bucks against society in the name of "the eighteenth century," which to him seems to evoke an uncomplicated time before modernity. Ford explores themes of lost innocence, public and private morality, and national decline. We follow Tietjens from his life as a bureaucrat in London to the trenches of World War I and back to his (greatly-changed) life in postwar England. Parade's End is startling as a document of major changes, completed just a few years after the end of the war. Thus it feels immediate and vivid. But I think it has also stood the test of time as a modernist experiment and a piece of art.

The style of the book is daunting and somewhat hard to get into. Ford used some similar narrative strategies--particularly the idea of deliberate obscurity and the slow reveal--before; I am thinking of The Fifth Queen series, in which the reader is often only partially informed about what is happening. But Parade's End represents the apogee of this technique, where it is used to illuminate characters' inner beings while reminding the reader of the essential confusions of life and morality. (Something along the lines of Paul Gauguin's monumental painting, "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?")

This tetralogy as a whole is a monumental work of fiction that I will never forget and am so glad to have read. It is a major undertaking to read the whole Parade's End, but it was worth it. It is rare for a work of fiction to be written with such serious deliberateness or such richness of interiority. These characters live.

I have reviewed each of the volumes of Parade's End in much greater detail under their individual pages. ( )

To put it simply, Parade’s End is a masterpiece. In the BBC Books edition, it is just over 900 pages in the life of Christopher Tietjens, a Yorkshire-bred gentleman whose world comes apart in the wake of the First World War. He begins the war as a brilliant young employee at the Department of Statistics and ends the war as a damaged, disgraced man. His beautiful but vengeful wife Sylvia has sought to ruin his name about town and in society, but he won’t divorce her because he does not feel it right that a man should divorce a woman (I guess she should do the divorcing?). Valentine, who happens to be the daughter of his father’s oldest friend, is a much better match for him intellectually and temperamentally, but he can’t bring himself to take the step of moving on with her and leaving Sylvia.

This is not a book to be read quickly; it demands reflection and contemplation. Some sequences feel dreamlike (for example, the last two chapters of the third book), some nightmarish (a great deal of the battle sequences), and some spend extensive amounts of time in the characters’ minds (one could argue most of The Last Post is a brain-based novel). Sometimes the narrative goes over the same events more than once, just from different angles. The shifts in time and perspective can be a bit disorienting at times but everything settles down by the end.

I quite liked the character of Christopher Tietjens, the man out of time, even if I did wish he would just go divorce Sylvia and marry Valentine already. His morality and viewpoints put him somewhere in the 18th century rather than the early 20th, and people don’t quite know what to make of him as a result. Sylvia says of him that "He's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them." He is intensely private and “would rather be dead than an open book”, which of course causes trouble when people (i.e. Sylvia) spread gossip about him and he does nothing to rebut it. And because he is “out of time”, I found myself wondering how he would fare in the present day. If he disdains referring to the Encyclopedia Britannica, what would he make of Google? Would he parlay his knowledge of old furniture into a stint on Antiques Roadshow? I can definitely bet he would not be a fan of Facebook.

The books were all written in the 1920s, so the First World War had just recently ended. This lends a freshness and immediacy to the wartime scenes (as does Ford’s own wartime experiences). Anyone familiar with the poem “In Flanders’ Fields” will find a chord struck when Tietjens’ men point out the skylarks flying over the battlefield and sassing the artillery, and the battle scenes in general are very vivid. The second volume, No More Parades, provides the most battle scenes if you’re into that sort of thing, as I am. The only really jarring note is the fourth volume, The Last Post, which focuses much more on Tietjens’ brother, Mark. Coming as it does at the end of the tetralogy, it can be a bit of a slog, but everything wraps up nicely while still leaving some room to imagine the characters living on after the last page is turned.

If you like wartime novels, or complex and fascinating protagonists, or writing you can really sink your teeth into, you’ll want to pick this one up. (And if you do, may I suggest marking off each chapter and reading one chapter per session – I decided to do this about halfway through the first volume and it really helped me get through the book.) ( )

Long, psychologically accurate and sometimes confusing. You feel like you're really getting to know real people but from a comfortable distance, which is a blessing since what happens to them is unpleasant in places.