• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1014 0

and collaborator Joseph Conrad (whom he first met in 1898) strove for progression d’effet in their novels, where ‘every word set on paper – every word set on paper – must carry the story forward, and, that as the story progressed, the story must be carried forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity’,1 and The Good Soldier, with its tortuous retreat from the farthest reaches of the Empire and the cosmopolitan watering-places of Europe to a loose box in a Hampshire stable (by way of two suicides, one fatality and one mental collapse), achieves progression d’effet of rare degree. It is universally regarded as one of the masterworks of modernist literature, a novel which explores tensions between light and darkness (epistemological, moral and narrative), speech and silence, desire and restraint, order and chaos with an ever-tightening power. Sadness is one of its many attributes; humour, oddly enough, is another.

But, if there is one mood which dominates the novel, it is doubt: The Good Soldier, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), is orchestrated by an unreliable narrator, in this case John Dowell. One of the richest sources of pleasure for readers is in pitting themselves against Dowell, attempting to figure out the stories behind his story, trying to make sense of his peculiarities, obsessions, tonal shifts and evasions. It is not easy, since there is no aspect of the novel which is not either shaded by or shot through with uncertainty.

One thing, however, seems clear: Captain Edward Ashburnham was not just a good soldier, but a very fine soldier indeed. A holder of both the Distinguished Service Order and the ‘Royal Humane Society’s medal with a clasp’ for having twice jumped from a troopship to rescue ‘Tommies’, Ashburnham, even more impressively, has been twice recommended for the Victoria Cross, the highest honour conferrable on a member of the British armed forces for conspicuous bravery in battle, ‘and, although owing to some technicalities he had never received that… order, he had some special place about his sovereign at the coronation [of Edward VII in 1901]’. It is small wonder Ashburnham’s troop had ‘loved him beyond the love of men’. Of course, by the time the Dowells meet the Ashburnhams in August 1904, the good soldier has resigned his commission, but being ‘tall, handsome, [and] blond’, and with a moustache ‘as stiff as a toothbrush’, Ashburnham still looks the consummate cavalry officer, even though his demeanour, like so many other aspects of this enthralling and challenging book, is deceptive.

As Ford mentions in his ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, he had wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, and had only offered an alternative as a joke when his publisher insisted that his preferred title would render the book ‘unsaleable’ following the outbreak of the First World War. Ford ‘never ceased to regret’ yielding to this importunity, and, as he anticipated, the title was something critics latched on to when the novel first appeared on 17 March 1915. The Observer’s reviewer, for example, saw it as indicative of ‘a desire to catch that public that does not want to hear of any other kind of excellence but military excellence’,2 although readers who did buy it for this reason would have been surprised, if not disappointed, to find Prussia treated sympathetically (apart from one passing slight) and the War unmentioned (though there are two oblique references to its build-up: in Part Four, Ashburnham attends a meeting of an imaginary ‘National Reserve Committee’ and a little further on he expresses his eagerness to get ‘the numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper standard’). But it was the title’s moral thrust, with its apparent stress on Ashburnham’s goodness as a man rather than on the calibre of his soldiering, which provoked most of the critical flak. One reviewer thought it unthinkable that ‘an officer and a gentleman… should have behaved as in close on three hundred pages of brilliant writing Mr Hueffer tells us he