Parade's End

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Parade's End (2012), five-part BBC/HBO television serial) by Susanna White, script by Tom Stoppard, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. [15] Penguin reissued the four novels separately in 1948, just after the Second World War. [ citation needed]

I found the book a bit "stodgy" and dull, and I wasn't convinced that "the old ways" were really worth preserving, if it ended up causing so much unnecessary grief and heart ache. Skinner, Paul, "The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in "No Enemy" and "Last Post", in History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford's Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford *Studies, no. 3 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York: 2004), 65–75. We are,' he answered. 'The Pimlico army clothing factory is in the constituency of Westminster; the Under-Secretary for War is member for Westminster; his majority at the last election was six hundred. The clothing factory employed seven hundred men at 1s. 6d. an hour, all these men having votes in Westminster. The seven hundred men wrote to the Under-Secretary to say that if their screw wasn't raised to two bob they'd vote solid against him at the next election...'Ford, Ford Madox (2010–2011). Saunders, Max; Wiesenfarth, Joseph; Sara Haslam; Skinner, Paul (eds.). Parade's End: Volume I. Carcanet Press . Retrieved 18 September 2012.

Even if these four novels have been reissued in 1948, after Second World War, the first omnibus version was published by Knopf in 1950. What a statement! And what a difference, here as everywhere, with Valentine Wannop, for whom the war is primarily a ‘mental torture’— Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II. Another commented: “The staff are really friendly and helpful and they have made the shop look beautiful and inviting.” COMMUNITY: The shop has been supported by local MP Sarah Olney (pictured, first right) Credit: Office of Sarah Olney MP

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As to the three volumes I did read, this was an excellent novel. The modernist style in which it is written at times obfuscates clarity, but for the most part it rendered a heavy subject matter relatively easy to read. But YMMV of course. In this particular case I think it helped Ford express the clash and horror of the change that the First World War thrust onto a society which was already ending anyway (as his main character, Tietjens, is fully aware of). A further disadvantage of the extreme interior view FMF gives, of the war and the times, is that context is never developed or revealed. I am not sure whether, for example, I would have perceived the portrayal of the disintegration of classes, had I not already known that WWI was the catalyst for this. I can't imagine what a reader without prior knowledge of the era and the war specifically would make of it. I’ve hired three part-time staff and they all love books, they read a lot and they’re good with customers.” The second novel of the sequence, No More Parades, finds Christopher with the army in France. His efforts are going unrewarded; his wife, Sylvia, is raising a scandal about him; and his love for Valentine has been buried deep under layers of responsibility. At the climax of the novel, he must undergo an extended interrogation to avoid a court-martial on charges of striking a superior officer (who had stormed into his hotel room late at night without identifying himself); that same morning, his command is to be subjected to a formal inspection. The resulting interior monologue invites comparison with Molly Bloom’s final monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume, Christopher has been moved up to the front lines, where he must survive a last-ditch enemy barrage. Shortly thereafter, the war finally ends; it is at last time for his love to surface from under four years of military repression. When Valentine’s name does pop into his conscious mind, he is astonished: “What! Is that still there?” Ford finally grants his lovers their first embrace, though not until the very conclusion of the novel: “They were dancing! . . . They were setting out.”