Parade's End

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The best novel produced by a British writer (and British has everything to do with culture, nothing to do with blood) is the tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford (previously named Ford Madox Hueffer) called Parade’s End. It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society. Ford is neglected. The finest editor of his time, he not only encouraged Joyce and Lawrence but actually wrote a good deal of Joseph Conrad’s fiction for him. If this judgment on the supremacy of Parade’s End be cavilled at, I am prepared to yield and to submit Ford’s The Good Soldier as the best novel ever produced in England.1

These provocations from Anthony Burgess say much about Ford, and the series of four novels that make up his postwar masterpiece Parade’s End. They tell us, first of all, that it is more than a great war novel, or a great novel of historical change: it is a great novel. Ford was a prodigiously versatile writer, moving agilely between most genres. But he saw himself as above all someone constantly searching for a ‘new form’ for fiction. Parade’s End engages with culture, with the nature of British society, with the war, certainly; and with many other issues that these things imply, and which are still pressingly relevant: feminism; masculinity; the relation between the sexes; class; politics; questions of nation and race; aggression and destructiveness; trauma; memory; the environment; technology; survival; creativity; art; representation; history. None the less, we should not forget that these things are Ford’s material, to be worked into a novel rather than a document or a discourse.

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