When Graham Greene edited the Parade's End tetralogy for Bodley Head in the '60s he completely omitted this last volume, and turned the series into a trilogy! He justified this act of literary vandalism by considering The Last Post to be sentimental, resolving ambiguities best left unresolved.
I rather think GG's real reason was that the series did not end in the same miserable way that he himself would have preferred to conclude it.
To me, this strikingly unusual conclusion to an already strikingly unusual work, is as absorbing as the first three volumes, even though the protagonist, Christopher Tietjens only appears briefly, in the last two pages. We learn more about his brother Mark, about his father's supposed suicide, and about his vicious wife Sylvia, told in a superbly executed stream of consciousness technique. It is a slow read, every sentence has to be considered carefully, picked up and looked at fr0m different directions.
And the experience is truly rewarding. Beats Joyce into a cocked hat, as one of the characters might say. ( )

Ford is really a master of this modern stream of consciousness style. This novel flows with nary a bump. Here we get to meet Marie Leonie and her husband Mark. I'll skip revealing the plot because it is definitely fun to let Ford present things bit by bit.

Here's a parallel work: Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. At the end of the movie, the hero and his partner have escaped the crazy world to a beautiful little corner of the country, with a vegetable garden etc. The hero's mother is a bit like the book's Sylvia, all glittery society and fashion. The horrors of the dystopia of the movie are like the horrors of WW1. My wife was comparing Sylvia and Christopher to some characters in a Somerset Maugham novel. Yeah there are probably scores of works of fiction that cover similar territory. Anyway, Ford does it with real style! ( )

Ripples. The war is over, and the world is changed, but enough?

Review: Parade's End ( )

I have an unpopular opinion in that I think I like this one best of the lot. See why on my blog. ( )

(spoilers) This is the final volume of the Parade's End tetralogy, in which we follow Tietjens into the postwar era (taking place about 1926, I think) and see the conclusion to his story through the eyes of his brother Mark, Mark's wife Marie-Leonie, and Christopher's wife Sylvia. This was by far the weakest of the four volumes in my opinion, though I see how its intention is to wrap up or resolve the multiple tensions evident throughout the series. However, in my opinion, the volume places too much emphasis on the idea of "never such innocence again." The narrative explicitly details how Mark's and Christopher's childhood bedrooms were destroyed by the falling of the Groby Great Tree as it was uprooted by an American tenant. Though throughout the tetralogy Ford's symbolism is quite heavy-handed, the almost-simultaneous uprooting of the tree and the death of Mark Tietjens as the symbols for the passing of an era seem extreme even by his, Ford's, standards. Add to the mix the imminent birth of Christopher's and Valentine's child--destined to be the new man of a new era--and the book ends on a slightly mawkish note.

However, I just finished this volume last night. Maybe I need to let it simmer for a while. Regardless, this tetralogy as a whole is a monumental work of fiction that I will never forget and am so glad to have read. It is a major undertaking to read the whole Parade's End, but it was worth it. There are few works made with such serious deliberateness or such richness of interiority. These characters live. ( )