Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)

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.… (more)

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.… (more)