Parade's End Series
Parade's End is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, written from 1924 to 1928. The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I. The setting is mainly England and the Western Front of the First World War, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts. The individual novels are Some Do Not... (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up — (1926) and Last Post (1928).
The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory". His wife Sylvia is a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him through her sexual promiscuity. Tietjens may or may not be the father of his wife's child. Meanwhile, his incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited pacifist and women's suffragist, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.
The work is a complex tale written in a modernist style, which does not concentrate on detailing the experience of war. Robie Macauley, in his introduction to the Borzoi edition of 1950, described it as "by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like... [but] something complex and baffling. There was a love story with no passionate scenes; there were trenches but no battles; there was a tragedy without a denouement." The novel is about the psychological result of the war on the participants and on society. In his introduction to the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up--, Ford wrote, "This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind".
In December 2010, John N. Gray hailed the work as "possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English", and Mary Gordon labelled it as "quite simply, the best fictional treatment of war in the history of the novel".
Excerpted from Parade's End on Wikipedia.
Parade's End
| Author | Ford Madox Ford |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Historical fiction, Modernist Novel, War Novel, Psychological fiction |
| Copyright | Public domain in the United States. (Last Post still be under copyright.) |
| Book cover | Thanks to Canva |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg |
| Scans | - |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive |
| Read online | I. Some Do Not ... --Read by Peter Dann-- Some Do Not …, the first novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly regarded Parade's End tetralogy, was originally published in April 1924 by Duckworth and Co. II. No More Parades --Read by Peter Dann-- No More Parades is the second novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly regarded tetralogy about the First World War, Parade's End. It was published in 1925, and was extraordinarily well-reviewed. III. A Man Could Stand Up — --Read by Peter Dann-- A Man Could Stand Up — is the third novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly regarded sequence of four novels known collectively as Parade's End. It was first published in 1926. IV. Last Post --Still be under copyright, please read it at fadedpage-- Last Post is the fourth and final novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly regarded sequence of four novels, Parade's End. It was published in January 1928 in the UK by Duckworth, and in the US under the title The Last Post by Albert and Charles Boni. |