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gigantic alligator’, and when Leonora recovers Maisie’s corpse she finds her ‘smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match’. In a similar vein, when Florence creeps up on Ashburnham and Nancy ‘under the dark trees of the park’, Dowell conjectures that Nancy, in her cream muslin dress, must have resembled ‘a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard’. These comparisons are precisely wacky, memorably weird, as is Dowell’s description, towards the end of the novel, of Leonora and Nancy persecuting Ashburnham ‘like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake’. There seems to be a calculated flippancy in play here, an irreverent ingenuity which pushes against the tragic swell of the story. Other examples might include Dowell’s description of himself going up and down the rope ladder to and from Florence’s bedroom ‘like a tranquil jumping jack’; Leonora glancing at Dowell ‘as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at [him]’, and Dowell’s use of this elaborately bizarre analogy to describe his role as Florence’s ‘sedulous, strained nurse’: ‘It was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet’s egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken.’ Once the reader tunes in to Dowell’s apparent frivolity it can be very hard to tune out, and the more distinctly we catch his words, the more inviting it becomes to read his sideswipe at the Belgian State Railway and his other digressions and quips (‘And then she stepped over the sill, as if she were stepping on board a boat. I suppose she had burnt hers!’) as part of a pattern of cynical disengagement. This impression is only reinforced when Dowell says in response to the imagined question of the imaginary silent listener: ‘You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all.’

Do we take these last words literally? Do they tell us that for Dowell, qua Florence’s husband, this saddest of stories is not really that sad ‘at all’? Or has the revelation of Florence’s adultery and Ashburnham’s affairs, their suicides and Nancy’s mental collapse, disturbed Dowell to such a degree that his distress intermittently finds voice in his outlandish turns of phrase? Like other aspects of his narrative, Dowell’s metaphors are unquestionably attention-seeking, and a key question for the reader is whether they betray a lack of nuance and control on Dowell’s part, as some critics have argued, or whether they provide evidence of his ironic detachment from his tale. All the reader can be certain of is that Ford has provided Dowell with a stock of flamboyant comparisons which bring him even more prominently to the centre of the stage, where the reader may observe him all the more closely, and where Dowell, now and again, loves to ham it up for all he’s worth:

You can’t kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet – the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars. Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

This overblown and actorly passage suggests that Nancy was more than justified in laughing at ‘some old-fashionedness in [Dowell’s] phraseology’; his assertion that, in future, all smoking-rooms will be ‘peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths’ is a no less ornate but more succinct example of the same tendency.

Florence, Dowell maintains, wanted to appear ‘like the heroine of a French comedy’, but at times she must have felt as if she had landed a part in a good old British farce. Soon after Ashburnham first sets eyes on her, for example, he lets out ‘an appreciative gurgle’. Like the ‘sound that was very like a groan’ which Leonora vents on hearing that her husband