Parade End Complete (Audible Audio Edition) Ford Madox Ford John Telfer AudioGO Ltd Books
Download As PDF : Parade End Complete (Audible Audio Edition) Ford Madox Ford John Telfer AudioGO Ltd Books
Consisting of four novels - Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post - Parade's End is the story of Christopher Tietjens and his progress from the secure world of Edwardian England into the First World War and beyond. Tietjens embodies the values of that ordered, predictable, hierarchic society of pre-1914. Contrasted with him and portrayed with equal clarity and depth is his wife Sylvia - beautiful, arrogant, reckless - a symbol of the new times. Their conflict, the chronicle of a family and of an era, makes Parade's End both a gripping study of character and a work of amazing subtlety and depth.
Parade End Complete (Audible Audio Edition) Ford Madox Ford John Telfer AudioGO Ltd Books
It surpasses all the recenty novels I have read about World War I. It gives a though perspective, not merely a historical one. The characters and the times, their way of looking at a fast-disappearing world are vivid on the page. The literary quality means that you can be transported back into the era without leaving your seat--or searching names and places on your computer. You are a part of the times, and bleed as they bleed. The work is a masterpiece; it reinforces the importance of World War I in our lives. A generation lost, a generation who survive lives in terrible fear. You should not miss this.Product details
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Parade End Complete (Audible Audio Edition) Ford Madox Ford John Telfer AudioGO Ltd Books Reviews
In some novels, the plot sucks you in and you just have to figure out how it all ends. In others, the author carefully makes an argument about human nature and explores it in a fairly satisfying manner. This book does neither of those things, instead, Ford gives you the opportunity to spend 900 odd pages in the the company of some extraordinarily lovable characters who've made a real bungle of their lives. He gives you piercingly clear insight into how they see their world (England, before and after WW1) and each other. You might think that their views are entirely wrong, and you'll almost certainly think that they should have made some of their decisions differently, but it's a treat to be able to spend so much time inside their fascinating minds. Ford isn't interested in being a Tolstoy with some well developed theory of how one ought to live, instead he presents a number of possible systems and shows how they're all fatally flawed. This isn't the sort of thing that appeals to everyone, but it's up there with my favorite novels of all time.
I quietly observed the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of The Great War -- which killed 9 million men, shattered the empires of Austria, Russia and Germany while fatally weakening those of England and France, and which destroyed the aristocracy of Britain and feudal systems everywhere – by reading this superb compilation of four great novels. In the first volume of this famous tetralogy, Some Do Not…, the war is looming and then breaks on the scene like an August thunderstorm. We are introduced to the married couple around whom the story revolves Christopher and Sylvia Tietjens. He is a brilliant up-and-comer in the Treasury, a genius and authority on every subject in the land, the largest brain in every room; she is wealthy, bored, beautiful and possessed of a wicked and merciless tongue. Tietjens is described thus “His private ambition had always been for saintliness he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled. That he knew marked him off as belonging to the sentimental branch of humanity.”
He and his wife have come to loath each other with a plate-throwing hatred that only great sensitivity and great intimacy together can produce. She leaves him and has a long affair with another man, after which he takes her back, so she is bitter and thinks he means her harm “And she acknowledged that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name and the shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.” Nice, no? He contemplates an affair with the lovely and intelligent Valentine Wannop, but does not act upon this inclination.
In the second book, No More Parades, Sylvia pursues Tietjens to France and his post in the middle of the war not far from the front. Chaos ensues when she lures men to her bedchamber and tells the Tietjen’s commanding officer, the appalled General Lord Edward Campion, that Tietjens is in fact a crypto-socialist. Meanwhile, the war is raging around them and Tietjen’s is becoming slowly unhinged by the fog of war and Sylvia’s monomania for making him miserable. She confesses to another man that the reason she plagues Tietjens is she loves him so much that she would follow him around the world if he would only throw his handkerchief at her. Campion is beautifully portrayed here as a thoroughly delightful amalgam of preposterous buffoon, poetry-spouting gentleman, shrewd soldier and astute judge of people, and he becomes one of the great literary characters of English military fiction. Meanwhile, Tietjens continues to moon indecisively about his regrettably platonic love for Wannop.
In the third book, Teitjens has been “promoted” to the front lines and is witness to all the carnage and chaos of war. Neither he nor the reader is spared the gory details of the brain-numbing violence. Meanwhile, back at home, Sylvia continues to explore romantic options, but she is jaded “She was by that time tired of men, or she imagined that she was…Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said ‘But I’ve read all this before…’ You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end….” Marvelous. The fourth book is dominated by interior monologues of the principle characters that are little short of brilliant and which tie up all the loose ends of the plot.
One of the charming oddities of this book is Ford’s use of exclamation points, something you do not come upon much in serious novels. He seems to use them ironically, or rather to punctuate an ironic observation, like little signal flares to alert the reader that a sly and ironic effect is intended. Another device worth mentioning is the way the plot advances with a sharp thrust forward of a surprising plot development, and then the author goes back in time a fills in the detail that adds context and meaning to the narrative development. It is done the way military incursions are projected and defended, and it lends this long book a lot of forward momentum but with a narrative stability that is very secure.
It is all very satisfying, but do not for heaven’s sake let your attention wander while reading this book or you will miss a subtlety. Its humor is very sly and, like really good champagne, it is very, very dry. The main story line of this great work – a man of honor trying to do the right thing as well as he can in a mad world of war that is going to hell in a hand-basket all around him, with comedy, love, loss, bitterness and redemption all rolled into the great human experience – is the same DNA that you can read in the two other magisterial serials of the 20 Century, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. In fact, what a great thing it would be to read all three of them in one go (perhaps on a very long sea voyage); you would have a pretty spectacular sampling of Englishnesss in the 20th Century.
Ford Maddox Ford (1873-1939) the grandson of Ford Maddox Brown the Pre-Raphalite painter was an innovative author in the early decades of the twentieth century. His most famous novels "The Good Soldier" and "Parade's End" have won him literary immortality. "Parade's End" is invariably listed as one of the best one hundred novels of the twentieth century. The huge 906 page tetralogy of four novels covering from 1912 to the postwar World World I has been made a bestseller due to the influential BBC series.
The book deals with such themes as
a. The passing of the old aristocratic class society of England as manifested in the life of Christopher Tietjens. Tietjens is a rural Tory who has grown up on the vast estate of Groby in the Yorkshire Ridings. Tietjens is infatuated with eighteenth century living but is forced by war and love to enter the mechanized twentieth century of social disorder.
b. The difficulties of married life. Christopher and his wife Sylvia separate. She is amorous, beautiful and unfaithful to the saintly Tietjens. Their one child Mark may have been the son of a man she had an affair with prior to the Tietjens marriage. Sylvia is a cold and calculating woman is loosely based on one of Ford's mistresses Violet Hunt.
c. The huge book evinces the disillusionment and world weariness of the World War I generation. Ford would influence the writings of such authors as Hemingway and other authors of the lost generation.
d. The book is a searingly realistic portrayal of the gritty and tragic warfare experiences oi British troops on the Western front. The petty politics of the officers and the rat like existence of the enlisted men are well drawn by Ford. He was a veteran of combat in France during the war.
e. The book shows us a classic love triange tale. Christopher is loved by both cold Sylvia and the enchanting young Valentine Wollop a virginal, youthful and athletic young lady.
The book is modernistic in its use of flashback and the adroit way the characters reflect on their emotions. Some readers will find this book slow but it will reward careful readers through its close examination of the complex business of human love. It can be very slow moving at times!
Minor characters and upper class British society are well drawn. "Parade's End" is a classic novel by a great writer. It is an essential read for literate English readers. Highly recommended!
It surpasses all the recenty novels I have read about World War I. It gives a though perspective, not merely a historical one. The characters and the times, their way of looking at a fast-disappearing world are vivid on the page. The literary quality means that you can be transported back into the era without leaving your seat--or searching names and places on your computer. You are a part of the times, and bleed as they bleed. The work is a masterpiece; it reinforces the importance of World War I in our lives. A generation lost, a generation who survive lives in terrible fear. You should not miss this.
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