Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)

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 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.… (altro)

The Good Soldier was an excellent audiobook. I've not read it before because I thought it would be about war, and dull at that. It wasn't even a tiny bit dull. It actually shocked me a couple of times; what a weird and twisted story it is.

To some extent I was right about the book concerning itself with war, but not on a battlefield but in the marriages of two couples. There were characters who fought on both sides of the war, there were spies, there were betrayals worse than ever those fought on muddy fields or in rat-infested trenches.

If you're Catholic and easily offended, this is not the book for you. I'm not Catholic and I was taken aback at the author's anti-Catholic themes that repeated throughout the book.

The thing that surprised me the most about the novel was the complete lack of sexual education some characters had. There is one character, female, who has no idea what sex is or where babies come from. I'm curious to know whether many women of the time (early 20th century) went into marriage as blind as these fictional people.

The Good Soldier goes right into a mental list of "best books". It isn't a favourite, though. It was too unpleasant and upsetting for favoritism, but the craft, story, and style of the novel make it a great one, however unhappy the story.… (altro)

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 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.… (altro)