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Title: Parade's End (Everyman's Library Classics) by Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Bradbury ISBN: 1-85715-114-3 Publisher: Everyman Publishers Pub. Date: 26 November, 1992 Format: Hardcover |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This Book is Obscure For No Good Reason.
Comment: One of the greatest books EVER written in the English language. Period. (Well, actually, it's four books, but they don't publish them separately anymore.) FMF is a modernist genius in the order of a Faulkner or a Woolf, with a beautiful style, incredibly human characters, and a mind-boggling knowledge of both the human heart and the physical world. FMF seems to be as quasi-omniscient as his noble last Tory, the main character, Christopher Tietjens. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that it's an easy book. Parade's End not a potboiler to read at the beach while you're getting a tan and sipping margaritas. It is a book that challenges the reader to let go of expectation and any hope of conventional structure, and to allow FMF's unique storytelling to settle into your gut slowly. It is a moral novel that doesn't moralize. A book about what it is to be good, to be a human being. FMF's beautiful style is even exceeded by his love for humanity and generosity of spirit. The sheer uncynicalness of the book--especially in this hollow, cynical age--is like a balm on this reader's eyes. This is one of those books, like Sound & The Fury, like Ulysses, like Pride & Prejudice, like Great Expectations, that EVERYONE should read.
Rating: 5
Summary: A tragedy of change, well told
Comment: Ford Madox Ford wrote prolifically, with a repertoire which experimented with style, character and narrative across a variety of settings and subject matters. Ford's Parade's End is among the very best of his works. The centerpiece, Christopher Tietjens, seems on the surface to represent a now-commonplace theme in English literature--the "last English gentleman" metaphorically swept away by modernity in the aftermath of the First World War. The first of this set of novels, "Some Do Not", features an opening passage which is laced with brilliant satire, crystal-clear character development, and a style which is utterly accessible and utterly enchanting. Through the rest of this novel, and well into the next volume, Ford seems to be telling a straightforward "passing of the noble old things" story. But Ford Madox Ford is rarely so straightforward, and these novels are no exception. What seems to begin as a mere bemoaning of a passing age turns into a demonstration of the inevitability, and even the desirability of its passing. Although Ford creates a perfect foil to Tietjens to apparently illustrate the vulgarity and superficiality of the modern age, things are not so simple. Tietjens views his world as irreparably fading, but Ford understands that Tietjens' world may never have existed at all. Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers novel cycle both try to show the passing of "old England" and the marching in of modernity. Neither Snow nor Galsworthy, though each is wonderful, does as much with narrative style as Ford does here. Ford's novels seem to take a simpler approach to the topic by creating Tietjens, the representative of the "old order", and his wife Sylvia, the representative of the "new", but by the time that the plot is worked out, the reader comes to understand that Ford has created a hall of mirrors and metaphors, and nothing is as simple as it seems.
This is one of the great must-reads of 20th C. English literature. It's a shame that it's not required Brit lit reading in every college survey.
Rating: 5
Summary: quietly sad and fully realized:
Comment: Parade's End isn't the swiftest moving of epics. Comprised of what are supposed to be four seperate novels, it appears unlikely that any of the subsequent chapters in the story could stand alone. It is a powerful book, the story an inevitable tragedy, the results more of an afflication than anything truly humbling. The idea is very precise: tell of what could happen to a brutalized, perhaps incestually based feudal family of the ruling sort when confronted with the Modern Horror of the quick-paced, revolutionized ideas of the roving, buzzing, continually at war world.
The Age of the Teitjans is coming to an end--the age of the Old Rich and the Founding Fathers controlling and manipulating everything they come in contact with. The generation of today is gentle and much more soft--Freudian psychology and the threat or embrace of Socialism having done away with the undeniable hope that is the forces of Organized Religion. Women's Liberation, the freedom of serfs and of slaves and the rampant attack of the Colonialists on their governing masters has made a man like Christopher unable to side with anyone other than those most against his past. Parade's End is a story of the future--not just the future in the eyes of the past (this book was published in enstallments from 1924-1928), but the future of any generation of today following the end of a devastating World War. We hear tell of the moral degradation of a nation, of the changing expectations of the populace and the aroused suspicions of everyone, both those who fought in the war and are therefore accustomed to viewing others as hostile and those who remained at home or went abroad to escape the immediate consequences of a world gone mad with rage. Parade's End tells of exactly that: the end of the human celebration and, in the words of Ford's sometime friend and collaborator, seeing "even the most justifiable revolutions (being) prepared by personal impulses disguised into screeds." For, as even the elite wealthy must compete with the common man for sustinance, human nature inevitably takes over, with all its crude biases and sexual fixations, giving blood to politics and fostering a climate simply devouring itself for spite and for fun.
This book is a grand telling of the doom of empires. It is a story forever of the future as those of any age settling into an accustomed life start seeing the next generation foundering and no longer regret their own mistakes. Now they start to live in the memory of some distant and frequently misremembered past triumph. At the end I found myself struggling to remember my own name . . .
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Title: Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm ISBN: 037575248X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 14 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Oxford World's Classics) by Ford Madox Ford, Thomas C. Moser ISBN: 019283620X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679723420 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy ISBN: 0375701966 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever ISBN: 0060528877 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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