Review: The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

With all those lands in so few hands, the English gentry needed an ideology of improvement, decorum in behavior and taste and values that would explain and justify the inequality, from the grandness of their manors to the tawdry ugliness of their employed poor. Hence Tom Jones, in which honesty and zest for life supplement material desire to match estate-building with satisfaction; hence, also, Jane Austen, who understood the seriousness of observing behavior, the better to make the match in a volatile society with wealth concentrated still further on every generation.

Sooner or later the social reality behind these novels of marriages made well would catch up, and what could we possibly have expected, but divorce and ruin, the specter of houses lost, values all too easy to abandon, and the floating feeling of social institutions becoming irrelevant, which can lead to depression, addiction, suicide. It’s a credit to Ford Madox Ford that his story of two couples and their adulterous affairs feels as fresh now, to me in Shenzhen, as it must have in 1915. Perhaps, as Ishiguro must feel, we are in another Edwardian age, when the grand narratives of our day are at last played out, and we drink and oversex ourselves out of worry for the world.

John Dowell, the priggish American narrator, is voiced on the Audible.com version amazingly well by actor Kelly Shale, who throws in a demonic, distant sort of laugh, bubbling with nervous energy. Surely there is a queer element to his feeling for Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier of the title, who Dowell twice calls handsome but stupid, who carries on an affair with Dowell’s wife? Dowell can not quite decide what to make of the English gentlemen, a peculiar type of fellow in any case, and rapidly on the decline, even before WWI virtually finished him off. And strong women characters, Florence and Leonora, we can feel from them across the gap so artfully styled between them and John: struggling, confused, with tough-skinned shades of Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, particularly in that both women don’t have children, which if doesn’t plunge their marriages into despair, doesn’t help preserve any Victorian values, either. And good riddance, we may perhaps add, if we didn’t remember that modernity is no less traumatic for the confusion it causes.

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