Appreciation: Parade's End

Well, Chez Buce has completed its readaloud of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End--all 836 pages of it, all four volumes including the one that Graham Greene seemed to feel shouldn't ever have been written. It was worth it (having done the work, how could we think otherwise?)--worth it, but I must say a bit of a slog sometimes. It's hard to remember a book that is such a conbination of dazzling structure, delicate insight and perverse, wrong-headed self-indulgent eccentricity--if I see another exclamation point or ellipse, I may break something!...but either way, I can't remember anything else quite like it.

I guess Parade's End is remembered (if at all) as a "war novel"--World War I again, as with so many others. But as Robie Macauley points out in a superb introduction, it is not about the war per se as it is about a whole way of life--call it "Edwardian" or more broadly "Tory," or for lack of anything more adequate, just "before the war."

Here it gets stylistically interesting. A second-rate novel would try to paint a panorama. Ford is acute enough to recognize that he can't do that so he focuses instead on a small number--half a dozen or so--incidents, carefully and lovingly developed: a progression d'effect, Macauley observes, channeling Flaubert. Most of these have little or nothing to do with the war itself, although I must say Ford's account of one German bomb landing on one English trench--and its aftermath--is as hair-raising a piece of war literature as ever I've read. Virtually all the others count as something closer to drawing-room drama, although the war is always somewhere in the background, a looming presence.

Reading the closing chapters this past week or so, I found myself to my own surprise reminded of another book I was reading at the same time --Gyula Krúdy's Sunflower. One of my problems with Sunflower is that I didn't know quite how to take it, because the world of rural Hungary seemed so far away. Oddly enough, Ford's Edwardian England seems almost equally distant, and I sometimes found myself just as wildered with Ford as I had with Krúdy. At one point, Mrs. B interrupted to say (testily?)--you're reading it as comedy. Are you sure it is comedy? The answers were no, I wasn't sure it was comedy, but yes, I was reading it as comedy because I couldn't think of it any other way. I suppose the fall of a civilization should not be lightly regarded but there may be something to laugh about in it even so.

I do think there is one insurmountable problem with Parade's End and that is a certain hollowness at the core--Christoher Tietjens, the hero, the protagonist, the one who acts or suffers (mostly suffers) through the tumultuous events of his time. Macauley reports that he was modeled on a real person. Maybe, but I suspect the really real person was Ford himself who, from his pictures, looks just about the same as Tietjens is described. I think the best you can say for Christopher is that he fits in the classic tradition of novelistic heroes, from Don Quixote to Prince Myshkin. The trouble is that both Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin are to be treated with irony, and it is the irony itself that makes them so rich and subtle. I suppose you can give an ironic reading to Tietjens, but I'm not sure Ford understood it or intended it.

In my mind, that is a major drawback, but it isn't fatal. Even given the difficulty with the protagonist, there is so much richness of detail in the individual scenes-comic or otherwise--that I'm delighted to have read it and will cherish the experience.