The Good Soldier

This is one of those books that everyone seems to describe as an under-appreciated classic. Obviously it isn't -- you can hardly open a book on 20th century literature without seeing its praises sung -- but for whatever reason, I hadn't read it before.

It's not quite what I was expecting. It comes as a Penguin Modern Classic with cover art by John Singer Sargent, it's set mostly in a German spa-town in the years before World War I, the characters are upper middle-class British and New Englanders -- everything is telling you to expect Henry James. And of course there are Jamesian elements: there is a hint of the old "naïve America meets sophisticated Europe" idea, and there is a huge amount of analysis and very little action.
However, show more this is very definitely not James. The language is light and the syntax flows readily at room temperature; ideas are communicated explicitly and directly; there is even the occasional joke.

Fundamentally, this seems to be a book about the process of narrative itself. There are only four main characters: the narrator, his wife Florence, Edward Ashburnham (the "Good Soldier"), and Edward's wife Leonora. The sequence of events described is quite short and straightforward, and the narrator goes through them over and over again, each time getting a different, further insight into what happened and how the events relate to the characters and motivations of the people involved.

It is made clear to us that it is the process of telling the story that allows him to do this. In other words, the events are defined and redefined by the process of reporting them. Interestingly, this was ten years before Schrödinger and Heisenberg established that the act of measuring a physical system inevitably changes the system. Probably too fanciful to describe this as quantum-literature!

Another thing we are made to realise as the successive layers of meaning are pealed away is that there is no externally-verifiable "right answer". We only have the unreliable evidence of the narrator, and he himself has no way to go back and establish that one or other version of events is somehow privileged. The narrator's conclusion that Edward was a good and lovable man and Leonora a selfish and manipulative woman is plausible, but he presents it as his own subjective view.

This is clearly a book that has had a big influence on western literature. For instance, I was reminded very strongly of the narrative technique used by Günter Grass in his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, which I read a few months ago. Grass uses exactly this idea, of the influence that fictional narrative has on the events it describes, and of the impossibility of getting back to a single, true, version of events. show less

Victorian literature might often hint at extramarital affairs and hijinx, but always under the guise of pursuing or seeking true love. Ford Madox Ford bravely struck a new chord in this 1915 novel with his statement that sometimes - if not often - it's just a fling, based on loneliness or the sexual desire. This stripping away of the curtains around the issue didn't land him in censorship waters like James Joyce a few years later, but his novel was branded as "unpleasant" and "dangerous". This for addressing an everyday occurrence in plainer language so that it might be explored on the page.

This novel is also an early example of literary impressionism, a style that we take for granted today. Ford takes a roundabout path to telling his show more story, providing us with an after-the-fact narrator John Dowell who tends to ramble and gets things out of order. Immediately we know who dies, so that's the hook to exploring why. John contradicts himself on occasion, or says something offhand that startles but then he doesn't address it immediately, and some of his adjectives take on a fresh meeting later. Rather than frustrating, however, it creates a layer of mystery and need-to-know that keeps the pages turning.

John is a significant example of an unreliable narrator, his judgements and feelings about what transpired shifting in several directions. Only the concluding pages provide confirmation where his true sympathy lies, when his actions speak louder than his words. Ford is suggesting through John that sometimes our passions are too much for the artificial constructs of society to contain - our religious moralities, our marriage contracts, our collective sense of decency. That someone who is destroyed when they run counter to these may be too well understood to be considered a villain, given the base desires most of us share; except that this characterization too must to be done, so the rest of us can go on with our orderliness and stability to win whatever happiness remains. show less

Was there ever such an oblivious man in literature as the narrator of this book? I realize it is set in a far different time from ours i.e. the early 20th century but I was incredulous that a man would not be in the least suspicious of a wife who kept him out of her bedroom while not one, but at times two, other men were in the same abode. Even when other people hinted that his wife was cuckolding him he apparently didn't suspect a thing.

Ford Maddox Ford wrote this book before World War I but it didn't come out until 1915. He wanted to call it The Saddest Story but his publisher told him that title would turn people off the book so he tossed off the suggestion of The Good Soldier. The Saddest Story makes more sense but that's water show more under the bridge now.
The narrator of the story is an American called Dowell. He is well-to-do and therefore sees no need for employment. When he meets Florence Hurlbird, a younger beautiful woman living with two maiden aunts in New England, he decides he must marry her. She accepts his proposal when she ascertains that he will take her to Europe for the honeymoon and the wedding is completed just before they set sail. On board the ship Florence has an attack of some kind and is thereafter an invalid taken care of by her husband. Although it is not explicitly stated it doesn't appear that the marriage was ever consummated. At the spa town of Nauheim where Florence is "taking the waters" they meet the British couple Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. Edward is on sick leave from the British army in India although we will learn later that this was a pretext to follow a young married woman who really was ill. Soon Edward has turned his roving eye to Florence and she reciprocated. Leonora knows all about her husband's proclivities and has already paid off a number of people who threatened to publicize previous affairs. The affair went on for years as the Dowells and the Ashburnhams met up at numerous places in Europe. Throughout all this time Dowell himself was unaware of the affair. It was only after Florence's death (suicide) that he learned the truth. It was Edward Ashburnham who told him in order to clear his conscience. He then killed himself. Dowell thought that he could then marry the Ashburnham's young ward, Nancy, but that plan fell through although he did end up looking after Nancy much as he looked after Florence. So, yes, it's a very sad story but one that I felt Dowell caused by his own naivety and inattention.

The introduction to this book tells me that it was autobiographical in many ways with Edward Ashburnham standing in for Ford. If so, then I'm quite glad he was safely in his grave before I ever graced this earth. Far from being "good" Ashburnham is portrayed as entirely without conscience where women are concerned. show less

Picked this up knowing nothing about the author or the book, without much optimism, as I expected a load of prudish Victorian/Edwardian sentimentality. Absolutely not what I got. Probably deserves fives stars but it's horrible, shocking and mawkish. The rot that came much much later, in the 1960s, is evident here some 45 years earlier. And it's written much better here. The Good Solider is the sign of a society that had already exhausted itself, even before the Great War. Perhaps the Great War was simply the excuse. Wonderfully crafted and like many such novels is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You suspect that this is partly because there is more of the author in it than the author understood, certainly this was Graham show more Green's view, because it was his favourite book (Greene and Ford were both fairly hopeless as men, and I think they viewed literature, as written by men, as a kind of coda of personal failure - I did too, once). Personally, my favourite book is probably Heart of Darkness. It so happens that Ford and Conrad were close friends, and Heart of Darkness is referenced in this work. But whereas Heart of Darkness pits civilisation against savagery, and man against nature, in a largely external way, The Good Soldier deals with internalities, with sex and love and God in Hampshire and abroad. A hopeless and confused book but bloody brilliant as a kind of horror story of quiet, "decent" lives masking agonising spiritual confusion and shocking inhumanity. And naturally everybody's got loads of money, so what the hell are they on about, really. Somewhat less but still interesting because of its treatment of "Anglo" Catholicism as something distinct from its continental equivalent, and its implicit suggestion that it represents some sort of noble maladjustment, an intellectual conceit that was popular amongst British intellectuals of the time - Greene himself as a somewhat later example. A horror story with no supernatural elements. show less

I think that Ford Madox Ford should have fought the publishers and stuck with his original title, The Saddest Story. It is a much better descriptor of this intense and depressing short novel. This is the story of the twisted lives of two unhappily married couples and the various affairs they involve themselves in. It's narrated by one of the husbands, John Dowell, whose wife Florence has at least two affairs, one with the husband of the other married couple, Edward, who is the title character. Leonora, Edward's wife, is aware of everything going on and trying to control events as much as possible by managing her husband's affairs - both in love and money. John, the narrator, insists that he never knew that his wife was having affairs. show more He tells the story of Edward and Leonora through a series of flashbacks after Florence and Edward have both committed suicide, Edward several years after Florence.

If the above description was confusing, I'll say I'm just following the layout of Ford's book. The unreliable memories and misunderstanding of events by the narrator and the rambling, out-of-chronological-order retelling make the novel complex and interesting. The writing style is amazing, especially considering this was written in 1915. The characters in this book are all pretty despicable, mostly being either totally passive, like the narrator, or passive aggressive, like Leonora. Usually I can't stand a book where I don't like at least one of the characters, but this book is good enough to overcome that. show less

Ford Madox Ford begins the tale with the words “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” which is a little nervy, I think – kind of like Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate and calling his shot. As if that weren’t enough, FMF “doubles down” in the preface to the version I read, explaining that when offered a chance to make revisions to the text, he decided not to change a word, as he realized the story was perfect the way it was. But d*** if the man doesn’t hit the ball exactly where he pointed.

The art of this novel isn’t in the story, which is almost tauntingly simple: an upstanding, well-meaning British officer with a romantic nature that makes him a little bit too susceptible to falling in love ends up show more inadvertently ruining the lives of his wife (a Catholic who feels unable to divorce him), a good friend (whose wife he succumbs to), and at least two sweetly innocent but emotionally fragile ladies.

The art of the novel is a little bit in the characterizations, which are authentic and intricate in a way I associate with Graham Greene, the highest compliment I am capable of giving. With few exceptions, no one in this terribly sad tale is actually evil: indeed, you could make the case that most of them demonstrate the capacity for extreme nobility – Edward, the tale’s tragic swain, is a generous and compassionate landowner; Leonora, his wife, willingly sacrifices her own happiness to secure his; Dowell, the tale’s narrator, similarly sacrifices his needs to accommodate the requirements of his wife’s (supposedly) ill health; Nancy, Edward’s final, fatal femme fatale, is sweet and patient and good. Each, however, additionally possesses a flaw – one tragic, inevitable, Aristotelean little flaw – that ends up perverting their nobility into something corrupt and awful and … yes … terribly sad. As summarized by Dowell (our first person narrator), part-ways through the tale: “I call this the Saddest Story, rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy,” just because … there is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people … drifting down life … causing miseries, hart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.”

Mostly, however, the art of this novel is in FMF’s masterly and novel storytelling. The tale is effectively inverted - told from end to beginning - by a narrator who assumes the reader is already familiar with the ending. In this way, FMF crafts a tale that, instead of building towards tragedy, starts with the tragedy already established and then unfolds the details in a way so maddeningly careless that the effect can only have been achieved through the most deliberate and careful writing imaginable. Instead of waiting and watching for tragedy to unfurl – as happens in most novels – tragedy meets us on the first page and accompanies us all the way through our subsequent journey. Which isn’t to suggest this is a miserable or unpleasant read: on the contrary, I would argue that FMF’s wonderfully ingenious storytelling is what makes this “saddest story ever told” not only bearable, but hauntingly human.

No short review could ever hope to capture all the worthy intricacies of this work. The title alone deserves its own paragraph: FMF’s introduction raises more questions than it answers about whether “The Good Soldier” is a literal reference to Edward, or meant in a figurative sense as a reference to all folks in this tale of act the role of “good soldier,” selflessly (or selfishly?) sacrificing themselves for the perceived good of others. Another paragraph might be devoted to FMF’s perception of Catholicism, which takes a beating in this tale. Another might be devoted to an analysis of the actual reliability of FMF’s supposed “reliable narrator”; yet another to debating whether, in this novel, FMF has indeed “laid [his] one egg and might as well die.” All of which would make this the ideal novel for a Lit 301 college course, without in any way undermining its merits as captivating and accessible tale, quickly read but not quickly forgotten. show less

This is a story of two marriages, a philandering husband, a controlling wife, living lies, keeping up appearances, misusing religion and pursuing happiness in all the wrong places. It is told by an unreliable narrator who scarcely seems to understand the import of the story himself. It is wonderfully constructed, gloriously convoluted, and amazingly misdirected. The narrator tells us, "I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes." He bounces back and forth and reveals in increments and as he does, your view of the people and events changes and changes and changes again.

It is a queer and fantastic world. show more Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. Indeed, it is beyond them all, because none of them seems to know what they want or what they feel, and the not knowing is a trap with serious consequences.

I liked this book tremendously. Much more than I thought I was going to when I began it. Ford almost does magic, because he makes you shift your perspective and your view and your understanding of the characters until you have flipped your impressions on their heads, but he does it without making you feel cheated or misinformed. And, so it is in life. We often form opinions on too little information. First impressions are often wrong. A small bit of information can make us see everything in a different light. And, placing blame is not always easy. show less