From the Lists: #30 The Good Soldier

Anticipation and Dread

Having recently completed a Edwardian romance that progressed at the pace of a glacier in winter, I was not terribly thrilled when I saw the book cover for #30, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915). Then I read the blurb on the back cover stating that this book "has established itself as a masterpiece of literary modernism, taking its place alongside Ulysses and The Waste Land as a ground breaking experimental work."

Having read both the book by James Joyce (#1 on the List of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century) and studied the poem by T. S. Elliot in college, I began thinking this could be a challenging summer reading project. This edition weighed in at a whopping 400 pages. I began dreading the 10-page-a-day slog through stream of consciousness rambling, but like my journey through Finnegans Wake (#77), I could mark is as a hard-won merit badge for my literary sash, a literary purple heart, if you will.

So, I was not disappointed to discover the book is more William Faulkner than James Joyce and is only 170 pages, with the rest of the edition dedicated to notes about the text and commentary.

Synopsis:

Imagine someone telling you a story. They really only want to tell you the highlights, omitting the particularly tawdry bits, but the longer they talk and the more caught up in the story they become, the more background they must provide for the story to make sense. In some ways this novel reads like a grandparent telling a story. Sometimes the plot moves forward, sometimes it digresses into the background of a character, sometimes the subtlety of the story is eventually revealed after the fact.

For example, in the first chapter you learn there are five main characters and three of them are now dead. The remainder of the novel deals with the events that lead to their deaths and the consequences for the living.

While we modern folks think that the Edwardians were an uptight bunch with their over weaning public displays of morality, it would appear that, like us, they had some difficulty with honesty, faithfulness, lust, love, and money. But, since divorce was expensive, shameful, and public (i.e. the proceedings and testimony were published in the papers), "good" people chose to remain married and simply pretended to be happy in public. Or so our narrator would have us believe.

This is certainly a tawdry tale for such a prudish time. Unlike The Golden Bowl, Ford's narrator does not hesitate to name the dirty deeds these characters characters commit. Although the narrator is probably the best of the bunch, it is difficult to believe that so much could be happening right under his nose without him having some idea that things were not as they seemed. Also, since the story is told in hindsight, it is quite possible that this narrator is shading the story to make himself more the innocent victim. I feel there is more to the story than the narrator states.

Ford Madox Ford: Playboy!

Note About the Author

Ford, himself had some marriage and divorce difficulties of his own.  Apparently he was quite the Byronic figure of his day, having been through a notoriously difficult divorce from his first wife. Some critics suggest that the book is partly autobiographical. Many of the settings in The Good Soldier are locations Ford and his first mistress lived in while he attempted to obtain a German divorce from an English wife who refused to sign the divorce papers dissolving the marriage.




Recommendation: I enjoyed both the narrative and the style. Easy to read, but kept me turning the pages.

Next up: #29 The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell

Milestone Moment: Not to toot my own horn, but with yesterday's post, this blog has surpassed the 10,000 page views milestone. If I monetized that, I would have made about $1.  Heck Yeah!