Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford – review
Writing to HG Wells from the French Riviera in 1922, Ford Madox Ford declared: "I've got over the nerve tangle of the war and feel able at last really to write again – which I never thought I should do." He had been suffering from amnesia, and for a time feared he would be unable to write the epoch-defining novel that he felt was necessary. But Ford now began to write a work that profitably drew on the frailties of the human mind, composed of fragments of memory and impression, that mirrored the psychological disorder that he felt and that he saw as an affliction of his generation.
Ford would spend the next six years at work on what was to become his epic portrait of the age, Parade's End. Republished to coincide with the new BBC adaptation, the novel presents a startling vision of a paradise lost, of a social and moral order in turmoil, with the war as merely a symptom of a wider, chronic malaise. While its radical, abstract technique was de rigueur with the young modernists, the novel has the scope, drama and social conviction of a 19th-century English novel. It also has a classic hero – Christopher Tietjens is the last gentlemen in an England going to the dogs, facing enemies at home and abroad, an anachronism clinging to noble ideals in an age of hypocrisy and materialism.
Tietjens's stand against the tide allows for a fascinating social panorama, but one deeply coloured by Ford's eccentricities and obsessions. The novel's real pleasures stem from its hysteria, its rampant sexual monomania, its broken-hearted pessimism and wild-eyed nostalgia. Fervently acclaimed over the years by writers and critics but never widely read, Ford's neurotic vision of civilisation on the brink intensely evokes the tumult of the period.