IoS paperback review: Parade's End, By Ford Madox Ford

Back on parade after nearly 90 years in the shadows

Ford's tetralogy was completed in 1928, and became one of the least-read Modernist "classics".

Overshadowed by Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, and others whom he had championed as an editor of The Transatlantic Review, his 1915 novel The Good Soldier was probably the only one that survived the period. Then Tom Stoppard wrote the script for a lush television series, and Ford was back. Those who complained about the disconnectedness of the TV series will realise this is a feature of a beautifully written novel. Past love, Violet Hunt, informs both Sylvia Tietjens, his hero's treacherous wife, as well as his young lover, Valentine Wannop, but there are also traces of Stella Gibbons and Jean Rhys to be found there.