"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford "Parade's End" is a book that you need to prepare for in advance, and which at the same time is impossible to be prepared for. Everything from the place and time of her action to the eponymous series with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role sets the reader to another classic English novel from aristocratic life in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh or at the very worst Nansy Mitford. However, in reality, "Parade's End" is anything but that: the Ford text is modern, tense, ragged, deconstructs the very concept of the novel, and in all that paradoxically lies in the mainstream - if not in the heart - of the English novel tradition.
The protagonist of the "Parade's End" Christopher Tietjens is the brightest head in the kingdom, an incredible intellectual and completely devoid of career ambitions. He serves in the department of statistics, he is rich, clumsy, reserved, and he is also very unhappy in marriage: Tietjens’s wife, a beautiful and defiant Sylvia, is cheating on him, but being a Catholic, she categorically opposes divorce. Sylvia seeks by all means to torment and, if possible, morally destroy her husband, finding in her ardent and inventive hatred of him a strange likeness of love. One day while playing golf, Tietjens meets Valentine Wannop - suffragist, athlete and daredevil. They are drawn to each other, but the chivalrous temper of Tietjens excludes the possibility of a banal adultery. Then the First World War begins, and the hero goes to the front.
However, you should not especially rely on this linear retelling. The Ford novel is most reminiscent of lace, but not so much by the subtlety and grace of weaving, as by the fact that the voids in it are no less important than the written fragments, and the sequence of loops sometimes does not lend itself to the usual narrative logic. Therefore, between the first and second parts, there is a gaping lacuna of several years in length, which the author does not even try to fill - it just starts the story anew from some point that seems random at first glance.
Heroes appear and disappear without any explanation, their actions are mostly devoid of psychological motivations, and emotions are described in a deliberately detached way - as if not "from the inside", but "outside". The episode of Christopher and Valentine dating in a curious way follows an episode in which the consequences of this acquaintance are discussed in the light, which makes the reader have a feeling of a little frightening absurdity.
This sensation of the absurd, blurred pictures, constant and rather painful discomfort, accompanies the entire process of reading. Having learned that the best friend of the main character Vincent Macmaster married his beloved, we wonder where her husband had time to go, after all, just that she was married to a half-crazy priest? When at the beginning of the second part Sylvia throws a plate with chops onto Tietjens's head, covering his military uniform with oil stains, we can only guess what really motivated her to make this gesture. Throughout the novel, we will have to acutely experience our readership incompetence and inconsistency - this was probably discussed above, we were just not paying attention, we missed something, we misunderstood something.
Semantic and emotional voids, deliberately left by Ford, are bursting into a novel from the inside, creating - with the transparent simplicity of the language and relative compactness of the text - the illusion of a large and multi-layered book that requires the most careful, possibly repeated reading.
However, fragmentation and dry restraint work not only on the effect "inside more than outside": they fill Parade's End with tremendous internal tension, which almost does not burst out, but hot inside. Each act in the absence of author's comments is filled with a special meaning, each look or word acquires a new weight and significance. It is this ability that mean Ford Minox Ford in all its magnificence in far 1924 (the first edition of the novel came out), which means Ford Madox Ford in all its splendor, was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, in many ways predetermined the development of English literature over the next hundred years.