Book 50: Parade's End
50 PARADE'S END Ford Madox Ford (England, 1924-1928)
The life of Christopher Tietjens, which devastatingly culminates with the Great War, as he struggles with his increasingly obsolete values, an unfaithful wife and a doomed love affair.
Parade's End is a tetralogy comprised of Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up -- and Last Post.
This is the hardest book review I've had to write this year, and interestingly enough the last one.
I'm not sure how I feel about this book because some parts were absolutely amazing, while the whole tetralogy was overly long and difficult to get through. At times, it felt as if Ford was trying too hard to write a modernist novel, and yet he is sometimes so successful, that one is reluctant to blame him for polishing his modernist skills.
Parade's End's action is told through the consciousness of its characters; characters who constantly obsess over specific events or ideas. Their obsessions change with time, and become less and less mundane as the war and the trenches make their appearance. A Man Could Stand Up --, the third volume and the best, includes some of the most vivid and haunting accounts of trench warfare I've ever read.
Ford also messes with the chronology, so the narratives constantly goes back and forth in time. While it makes the plot challenging to follow when it focuses on the mundane lives of the English aristocracy, these jumps make perfect sense in the context of the war, when a soldier is unable to let go of what he has seen and heard.
Overall, Parade's End is an extremely challenging read, sometimes to the level of Faulkner's work, and I truly feel that Some Do Not... and Last Post (the first and the last volumes) were not as compelling as they should've been. Yet the best moments in the second and third books make the whole tetralogy worth the read.
3.5/5
The life of Christopher Tietjens, which devastatingly culminates with the Great War, as he struggles with his increasingly obsolete values, an unfaithful wife and a doomed love affair.
Parade's End is a tetralogy comprised of Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up -- and Last Post.
This is the hardest book review I've had to write this year, and interestingly enough the last one.
I'm not sure how I feel about this book because some parts were absolutely amazing, while the whole tetralogy was overly long and difficult to get through. At times, it felt as if Ford was trying too hard to write a modernist novel, and yet he is sometimes so successful, that one is reluctant to blame him for polishing his modernist skills.
Parade's End's action is told through the consciousness of its characters; characters who constantly obsess over specific events or ideas. Their obsessions change with time, and become less and less mundane as the war and the trenches make their appearance. A Man Could Stand Up --, the third volume and the best, includes some of the most vivid and haunting accounts of trench warfare I've ever read.
Ford also messes with the chronology, so the narratives constantly goes back and forth in time. While it makes the plot challenging to follow when it focuses on the mundane lives of the English aristocracy, these jumps make perfect sense in the context of the war, when a soldier is unable to let go of what he has seen and heard.
Overall, Parade's End is an extremely challenging read, sometimes to the level of Faulkner's work, and I truly feel that Some Do Not... and Last Post (the first and the last volumes) were not as compelling as they should've been. Yet the best moments in the second and third books make the whole tetralogy worth the read.
3.5/5