The Good Soldier (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

This is a real page-turner with great storytelling and wonderful writing. It's an apparently simple story of a cuckolded husband but Maddox Ford tells and retells the same events from the point of view of each participant so that the reader's understandings and sympathies are constantly shifting as he begins to comprehend the complexities and motivations of those involved. Characters we thought we liked at the start become obnoxious and those we loathed are redeemed. It's clever not only because the ground constantly shifts under the reader's feet but also by the way the story is told - getting one of the characters to explain all the others. This has two effects, first, by avoiding the God narrator it legitimizes the fact that the reader doesn't understand everything at once, and secondly it makes the whole affair much more intimate and personal because these events are happening to the narrator who is our friend.

The story concerns two upper middle class couples who meet at a German spa at the turn of the 19th century and become good friends over many years. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that beneath their simple outings and picnics, sexual and emotional plate tectonics are at work. More and more is slowly revealed of what has been going on and the final pages are tragic and grim.

Much is made in literary circles of the fact that the narrator is unreliable and frequently contradicts himself or is plain wrong. This is a very neat device that covers up the fact that somehow the narrator has gotten to understand what everyone else in the story was thinking or feeling. His unreliability is really chaff to cover up this unlikely situation. Nonetheless it is well done and makes the tone and structure of the book enjoyable and unusual. In particular the narrator constantly time shifts the story backwards and forwards and fails to tell the reader some facts about events until later so that they appear mysterious and only later can be pieced together. If you enjoy detective fiction you should enjoy this.

At heart this is a desperate story of a group of people who set off in life and make a mess of it. Some are naïve, some manipulative, some loving, some hard-nosed, some living a full life and some just passing through. Which is which and who is whom the reader cannot understand until the end and the slow reveal is delightful, sad and horrific.

Terrific book, extremely advanced for its time, though it does show Jamesian influences. It starts out: "This is the saddest story I've ever heard." Quite loosely written, with an ingenuously lazy wit, and it's a very complex story about two couples, ironically narrated by an American man, who is a splendid combination of naive and penetrating psychological insights, who is trying to document and piece together the steps leading to the suicide of Edward, his English friend, who in spite of the fact that he was an excellent fellow he was unable to keep his hands off whatever women came his way, and fall madly in love with the least appropriate damsels. I suspect the English fellow is a self-portrait, for the narrator is very gauche, and innocent, and not at all like Ford.

Ford Madox Ford, although a literary figure often undervalued, must stand alongside the lofty literary statures of giants such as James Joyce and Henry James. Much maligned in life, Ford reflects this in the novel "The Good Soldier" and creates, perhaps, the first modern narrator. Inconsistently and often unreliably, Ford's narrative tells a tale that, although not particularly epic, brings in the reader a sense of sadness and fatalism. "The Good Soldier" often verges towards the Greek Tragedy in that it is a tale of a man destined to pollute all those around him through his infidelity. Written in a time of repressive sexual attitudes, Ford manages to convey a story that, although self-censored, reflects the hidden lives of the real social world; sex, betrayal and adultery. The novel is of great value to anyone currently studying an English Literature course as the narrative style is a groundbreaking one which has influenced the world of literature since. It isn't a great bedside table book yet for anyone interested in the development of the narrative style in English literature it is surely a must.