The Good Soldier

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

I can't believe this novel is 100 years old. It feels more contemporary than novels we now call "modern" or "post-modern;" it's more like a midlist literary novel that could have been written yesterday. I especially enjoyed the way I was led into the story thinking this man was suffocating his wife with over-care, then learned she was a more than equal foil to him.

The only thing that marred my enjoyment somewhat is having read "The End of the Affair" before this novel. Greene's style in The End of the Affair so clearly owes a debt to Ford. But Greene failed to mimic the cunning and un-pindownable nature of Ford's narrator, replacing Ford's possible sociopath/double murderer with a humorless and petty narrator that I had to banish from show more my head before I could fully engage with The Good Soldier. 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

"The Good Soldier" follows two well-to-do couples, John (the narrator) and Florence Dowell and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham through the course of their relationships, especially Edward's endless philandering with any woman who will submit to his relentless sexual advances. The story, told long after the events have actually transpired, details Dowell's conversion from innocent onlooker in the four-way friendship into a man whose world has been turned upside down by the discovery that his wife has tried to seduce his best friend. Even then, Dowell chalks up Ashburnham's dalliances to mere "sentimentalism," a need to paternalistically place himself in a situation where he is seen as the selfless hero, as the "good soldier." While Dowell show more is sometimes more than fair with Ashburnham, at times he relentlessly mocks him, commenting on his stupid expressions and his petit bourgeois concern with "keeping up appearances," even in the face of a sham of a marriage. Ford seems to be looking for answers to explain such behavior, but doesn't even seem convinced by his own dubious explanations.

Marked by a radical break with the earlier, traditional Victorian novel, "The Good Soldier" is highly evocative of the society novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and even some D. H. Lawrence. Adultery is discussed frankly and directly, and instead of the morally certain, honest, objective narration that we see in work before it, Ford's narrator is bereft when he finds his search for meaning and simplicity an empty one, finding in its place an ambiguous and unreliable world. This is a hard pill to swallow for those who have been weaned on Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Its subtlety and sensitive psychological representations mirror the complexities of people, not stock characters.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is how utterly conflicted Dowell remains throughout the novel. The authority of his narrative voice waxes and wanes (mostly wanes) through the entire story, which might be frustrating for some readers, but was a welcome relief for me. Concomitant with this voice is an overall ambiance of moral turpitude and decadence, and not simply as a result of Florence and Ashburnham's affair. Dowell is never slow to remind the reader that he knows little, that he might be wrong, that this was only the way things seemed to him. It is hardly a surprise that Ford, who considered himself an "impressionist," has very much up to the name and written a novel of fleeting impressions and reminiscences which always fall short of cohering into a unified story whose characters motivations are convincingly delineated.

One of the results of Ford's technique is that it breaks with one's usual response after having completed a novel: since Aristotle, we have come to find some sort of intellectual catharsis from tragedy, but this is a story that complicates that expectation, even if we are afforded some sort of edification in human moral psychology. The novel was written in 1915, no doubt a perilous time in European history. At the risk of committing an egregious post hoc ergo propter hoc, it may be that Ford's narrative is indicative of a world on the precipice of the Great War, whose social and cultural orders have shifted from firmly hierarchical to nebulous in less than a generation.

Even if you do not care for the novel itself, it would be difficult to deny its important place in a canon of works that need to be carefully and thoughtfully read to have a fuller and more appreciative knowledge of twentieth-century English literature. I cherished it, and its characters seemed like some of the most artfully drawn I've ever read. Weeks after having finished the novel, the various tête-à-têtes and interrelationships continue to dance through my head while I imagine sitting down next to Dowell while he tells me his story. show less

The narrator sits down to relate the saddest story he's ever heard. It quickly becomes apparent that he was right at the core of the story, and the reader becomes a little uneasy as to the accuracy of the telling. The story is told in portions that we are told were written many months apart, which provides an air of authenticity as we are caught up on intervening events. When you get right down to it, the narrative perspective, the disjointed chronology, and the somewhat ambiguous participation of the narrator in the events are what make this book interesting (to me at least). The tale itself is one of serial adultery and various lowdown shenanigans of British gentry and American gentry-equivalents in pre-World War I England (though show more much of the action is set in Germany and even in British India), which reinforces the notion that people who don't have enough to do will eventually get themselves in trouble. The novel also adopts an anti-Catholic bias that provides a lot of the tension. The couple at the center of the action includes a Catholic woman who can't escape the problematic marriage that causes all or most of the trouble by simply divorcing and going her merry way. Of course, the lack of a no-fault divorce procedure in England at the time also contributed to the problem. The couple stays together and ends up destroying their own lives (or at least one of them) as well as those of several innocent (or maybe not) bystanders. All this while the rich American narrator looks back in astonishment at what all was happening under his very nose. 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