Parade's End
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes.
A masterly novel of destruction and regeneration, Parade's End follows the story of aristocrat Christopher Tietjens as his world is shattered by the First World War. Tracing the psychological damage inflicted by battle, the collapse of England's secure Edwardian values - embodied in Christopher's wife, the beautiful, cruel socialite Sylvia - and the beginning of a new age, epitomized by the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Parade's End is an elegy for both the war dead and the passing of a way of life.
'The finest English novel about the Great War'
Malcolm Bradbury
'The best novel by a British writer ... It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society'
Anthony Burgess
'There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them'
W.H. Auden
'The English prose masterpiece of the time'
William Carlos Williams
Customer Reviews
Really a rewarding read!
Quite hard going at times, but well worth the effort.
Parade's End
A fascinating and engrossing novel which has been very poorly digitised in this edition. There were two versions of the title at the same price and I chose the Penguin edition for sentimental reasons. Bad mistake - it is absolutely riddled with typos and spurious punctuation.
The style and language are in any case quite challenging so the transcription errors are doubly irritating. Set in the Britain of only 100 years ago Parade's End describes a society which seems as strange and distant as any ancient civilisation. Sardonic and satirical, it lays bare the dishonesty and hypocrisy of its characters and their society yet somehow celebrates rather than condemns the humanity which fills its pages.
A moving and powerful evocation of the mores and psychology of the Britain which plunged into WW1, for me it resonates with Powell & Pressburger's Colonel Blimp and the first volume of Skidelsky's biography of Keynes. At times the writing has the intensity of Charlotte Bronte and the internal monologue of James Joyce.
I recommend Parade's End to any intelligent reader, just not in the messed up Penguin iBook version.
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