For many days I have inhabited England during and after World War I, flawlessly rendered by the literary genius Ford Madox Ford. Finishing his tetralogy, I am thankful to finally be released from the strains of being absorbed in that emotionally and physically draining era.
Yet this place of horrible fascination I could not leave. What would become of the suffragette Valentine Wannock, the conservative mathematical genius Christopher Tietjens and his dreadful wife Sylvia? Learning the answers meant waiting until I could read the last page.
"Mad Fordox Mad," my fellow English major pal and I called him, oh so cleverly. But we were too young to appreciate his work. Reading The Good Soldier (published 1915) at age twenty, I missed the comic tone entirely. Fascinating though this professor was, John Hulcoop's English novel class at UBC was an 8:30; perhaps I was too drowsy to fully appreciate his commentary.
But I never forgot the book. Many years later I read that Ford was a satirist, and broke my "once only" reading rule. One line that has stayed with me from that second and far more amusing reading concerns the ward Nancy, who is being passed back and forth between two men in competing fits of heroic self-abnegation "like a parcel no one wanted to pay the postage on."
On the whole, the Tietjens story is not funny, though it has some humorous moments. Parades End (Penguin, 1982; originally published 1924-28) has definitely stood the test of time. Besides rendering the particular and long-gone setting of time and place, the novel succeeds brilliantly. The era comes to life with startling clarity, but the struggles portrayed transcend place and time.
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