Tales from the Library: Parade’s End Won’t
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
I want to write more about what I’m reading this year. Not book reviews as such, because I burnt myself out on formal book reviews a few years back, but I’d like to do more of the written equivalent of what we do on Galactic Suburbia - chatting about current reading.
Which is how I end up here, talking about a book I haven’t finished yet! But oh, READING Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford has taken up so much of my thoughts and reading energy over the last couple of weeks, I am not sure I will have the strength to write about it at all when I finally make it over the finish line.
I ordered Parade’s End from the local library because there’s an adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch which I plan on seeing at some point. I thought for once, how about I read the book first? But whoa, what a whopper! At over 800 pages, it turns out that it’s actually four books in one.
I didn’t start reading until the book was already overdue at the library, and I couldn’t get an extension because someone else had ordered it. So I dived in and discovered a magnificent, crunchy, difficult story that I had to pay constant attention to.
Parade’s End is the story of Christopher Tietjens, his occasionally estranged and cruel wife Sylvia, and the young Suffragette, Valentine Wannop, with whom he falls in love but can’t quite manage to arrange an affair with. All three of them are so fucked up they can’t see straight, Christopher in particular being something of an emotional cripple, and they lurch their way through the entire First World War, hurting each other and having strained conversations and managing to barely grasp anything like happiness with their fingertips.
It’s wonderful. As a broken story of broken people (and by an extension, the broken world order of English aristocracy before and during the war) it is extraordinary. As a trained genre reader, it feels like Ford does everything wrong. Seriously, he breaks every rule I’ve ever heard about writing. The story is almost constant flashback or flashforward - he darts around the personal history of these characters like a flighty psychotherapist, filling stories from the past out with great relish and far more significant emotional detail, sometimes multiple times. He skips forward in time with great abandon, then pulls in tight for a minute-by-minute examination of an awkward dinner party. We miss all the important bits, then discover them through stilted interrogation between characters, all of whom are slightly unreliable narrators even (especially) when talking to each other.
But most of all, I’m captured by Sylvia. She’s the kind of character who would earn unrelenting fangirl hatred if written today - and I haven’t dared check what Tumblr thinks of her in the TV version - but I am always really impressed when a writer takes a character I would never like and makes them compelling and sympathetic. Sylvia does awful things in this book, mostly to get the attention of her emotionally closed-off husband (it never works) and they so often rebound not only upon Christopher but on herself, and yet I am compelled by the scenes in her point of view because she is so very alien, and I want to know what she will do next.
Christopher Tietjens has to be the most frustrating fictional character ever, and the fact that he is married to Sylvia is a wild and deliberate cruelty on behalf of the author.
But yes, I’m loving this book even though it goes on forever and I have to pay attention to every word (Talk about cruelty) because every time I blink or get distracted, something like an unexpected court martial happens, or we flick forward three years. I ended up taking the book back to the library half finished and bought it on the Kindle.
Unfortunately the combination of the crazy long book and “starting” it in the middle seems to have messed with the head of my Kindle Paperwhite which has been insisting that there is always two hours and twenty nine minutes to the end of the book, no matter how much I read.
If I never read another book, you’ll know what’s happened. Parade’s End continued endlessly into my future and I - could - not - stop - reading it.