This is a really small stage, a single town in France in the middle of WW1. Ford lays out more explicitly the foundations of Tietjens's character - don't peach to the headmaster. Well, I spent a couple years as a young student in an English boarding school. He's right about that! There are just a few characters here. The whole thing is really a pressure cooker, the confinement inducing a build up of pressure.

Ford's technical mastery hits a new level here, beyond that of Some Do Not. In No More Parades, Ford has streams of consciousness of multiple people interleaved. He pulls it off! ( )

Audiobook edition narrated by Stephen Crossley, very good job.

This second book in the Parade's End series gives more insight into the character of Sylvia Tiejens. ( )

Even better than the first book. Full review on my blog.

Side note, I do miss cross-posting here but cannot on principle after GR has gotten so heavy handed about deleting reviews. ( )

When I am unconvinced by a much celebrated novel, my default mode is "try harder", hoping that I will connect if I stick with it. This approach often pays off. There have been exceptions, most notably, (and predictably), Henry James. My struggles reading Portrait of a Lady gave me some small insight into dyslexia (how is that a sentence?), aphasia (how does this conversation make any sense whatsoever?), and attention deficit disorder (am I going to have to read that paragraph yet again?).

To James, I reluctantly add Ford Madox Ford to my list of the dead ends encountered along my literary journey. Somewhere in Parade's End, there is a great story. I know this because Tom Stoppard created a great screenplay from it for BBC. He used Parade's End's themes, setting, and characters, enhancing the plot, and adding action. Most importantly, he somehow got this lumbering locomotive back on the rails. Ford, on the other hand, can't seem to get out of his own sputtering way. His liberal use of ellipses (. . . .), sometimes a dozen or more times on a single page, means that the reader must wade through hundreds and hundreds of garbled and unfinished sentences, even as Ford is tending, in countless additional ways, to derail his own story.

It could be that Ford is using style to mimetically burden the reader with the dysfunctional temper of his time, i.e. the derailment of virtually everything that one might trust and believe in, ultimately culminating in, and exemplified by, WWI. If true, then it asks too much of his readers and dooms Parade's End to, if not obscurity, then at least to rarely being read. ( )

The second volume of Parade's End follows Christopher Tietjens to war, where he works as a dispatching officer organizing men to go to the front (You can see that my military knowledge is not very great. I couldn't even begin to describe his job more precisely than that). This volume is laden with symbolism of death, decay, and despair that starkly contrasts with the (by comparison) almost pastoral tones of the first volume. This is hardly surprising given that it is set in war-torn France and focuses almost entirely on Tietjens's experiences in the shift from civilian life to a military officer. We watch his despair and lack of control as one of his men is unexpectedly killed in an air raid and dies in his arms. We see his voluntary abstention from the comforts of the hotel where the military surgeon has ordered him to stay.

It does a lot to help the reader understand the inner psychology of the primary character. But as someone with limited military knowledge, setting the entire novel against the backdrop of the war was a little confusing for me. There was a lot of outdated military vocabulary that I could not figure out or find definitions for, which made it a little harder for me to understand what was happening. This did not seem to be part of Ford's strategy of selective obfuscation; rather it's just a set of terminology that can no longer be understood without difficulty. So this knocked down the star rating on this volume--at least for me. Still highly worth reading. ( )