Book Review: "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford (Pt. 4)

Rating: 5/5 - what a fitting end to such a heartfelt novel of war!

***

This volume is set on a single June day in the years after the First World War. While the earlier volumes charted the approach to and experience of war, this instalment turns to its aftermath. Here is Ford commenting on a society stripped of its old certainties and confronting the psychological and moral wreckage left behind. It feels more like the ideas presented by an Evelyn Waugh novel. Is it really time to let go of the past? Yes, yes it is.

Tietjens now earns a modest living dealing in antique furniture, which seems to be exactly what he wanted in volume 3. He shares a cottage in West Sussex with Valentine Wannop - along with his older brother Mark Tietjens and Mark’s French wife, Marie Léonie. They live in a rural community and though the war is over, nothing is really fixed and we see that through the fragility of the domestic arrangement. Ford wants us to believe that there's always something quite 'up' even though there is peace. Just because the political is at peace, does not mean the personal is.

The volume revisits incidents from earlier volumes, reinterpreting them through shifting perspectives now that the war is over and everyone is 'safe' though nothing has really returned to normal. Events that once seemed fixed are reopened and scrutinised, creating a morally mixed narrative that complicates our understanding of the conflicts and what they meant. This retrospective reflection depicts that the war’s meaning is unstable, and continually remembered differently rather than securely contained in history. Again, this is not just a political entity - it is a personal experience that has shifted since the political has normalised and the personal has not.

The second, shorter part concentrates on external threats to the cottage household. These include the arrival of Tietjens' estranged wife Sylvia Tietjens, their son Mark Tietjens Junior, and an American tenant occupying the ancestral Tietjens estate. Their presence disrupts the tentative peace Tietjens and Valentine have attempted to build. In reality we see that the war overseas might be over and the war at home is still being fought. People are now more broken than ever, relationships have been through a million fights and still, try to stand even though the results say they should not. Volume 2 shows us the same thing - Tietjens would rather fight in a world war than confront his sociopathic wife. Both are now broken seemingly beyond their marriage's repair.

Much of the narrative is filtered through Mark Tietjens, who lies mute and paralysed in an outdoor shelter. His immobility mirrors the intense activity of his mind, as the text renders his interior reflections. He has vivid recollections, incredible critiques and introspections that are deeply profound and philosophical. Other sections adopt the viewpoints of Marie Léonie and Valentine, while occasionally entering the consciousness of Sylvia and minor figures, producing a polyphonic, psychologically intricate structure. It also shows us that though the war is over and the end of the last volume had a celebratory atmosphere - they aren't really all that happy. They aren't happy at all.

Valentine’s pregnancy intensifies the emotional and social tension. As an unmarried woman carrying Tietjens' child, she feels the sting of social judgement and the insecurity of her position. Financial anxieties compound this strain: Tietjens' American business partner has failed to send owed funds, leaving the household in a precarious economic state. Again, this reminds me of Brideshead Revisited in the fact that though the war is over and everything should have returned to normal, there is something left hanging in the air that doesn't get addressed until its too late. That problem includes two things: time and money. Both are running out and running out quickly. Peace cannot survive when everyone harbours their emotions as deep secrets.

But deeper still lies the feud between the brothers, rooted in Sylvia’s malicious rumours about her husband. These slanders were believed by Mark and their father, creating a breach that Tietjens, bound by personal honour, refuses to bridge by accepting financial help or inheritance. It is horrifying because we now have a situation in which they must all exist together and yet, they cannot all talk about this in the air at once. They cannot completely confront each other - things are left unsaid, thoughts are left incomplete and people still abide by the very politenesses and people-pleasing that they each swore they would drop for the sake of modernisation. They didn't drop it at all. They cannot.

Sylvia’s continued scheming drives much of the volume's conflict (and the entire novel's as well). She attempts to turn neighbours and landlords against Tietjens and manipulates the American tenant at Groby (their ancestral home) into cutting down the Groby Great Tree, a potent emblem of Tietjens heritage and continuity. Honestly, this is perhaps the worst thing she has done. She is bitter and horrid and in my opinion, she is one of those women who simply cannot move on from a problem that initially, she created. Her problems have arisen from herself. I cannot have much sympathy for her. Eventually she has a change of heart - though I would say it is too little, too late.

The novel closes with Mark's death. It is quite upsetting and there isn't much of a redemption arc. We are left with Ford's message of the personal being beyond repair if everyone is going to commit to the silences and profound emotional distances these characters have created. It has been a deeply upsetting book at times but I think there is agency in suggesting that love and death moves us on - hatred, secrecy and cunning only sticks us to the present. And the present is not always that great.