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has exempted Mumford from paying his rent, Ashburnham’s utterance may betoken the disruptive and ‘tempestuous forces’ which surge just below the starched surface of Edwardian decorum, but if the reader hears anything other than a strictly gruff note in his noise, it could well raise a smile. In a similar way, the image of Leonora and Maisie standing silently side by side in the hotel corridor with Leonora’s gold key caught up in Maisie’s hair and it having to be untangled by Florence, may strike the reader as more humorous than horrendous, and there are a number of other scenes in the novel which assume a comical aspect once we try to picture them. These include the dead of night, rope-ladder flitting of Florence and Dowell; Dowell standing by with his axe outside Florence’s bedroom door in Paris ‘in case she ever failed to answer my knock’; Leonora, towards the end, returning to her room ‘like a lame duck’ after a confrontation with Edward and ‘stumbl[ing] over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall’; Leonora, just ten days after her husband’s suicide, looking out of the window and seeing rabbits on the lawn at Bramshaw, four-legged precursors of the rabbit-like Rodney Bayham who will soon take her husband’s place, and, most comic of all (if it strikes us that way), the mute and vacant Nancy suddenly blurting out ‘Shuttlecocks!’ with ‘her knife and fork… suspended in mid-air’.

As long ago as 1948, the critic Mark Schorer wrote an influential critique of The Good Soldier in which he hailed it as one of the ‘great works of comic irony’ and argued, among other things, that

perhaps the most astonishing achievement in this astonishing novel is the manner in which the author, while speaking through his simple, infatuated character, lets us know how to take his simplicity and his infatuation. This is comic genius. It shows, for example, in the characteristic figures, the rather simple-minded and, at the same time, grotesquely comic metaphors…21

Nowadays, few commentators would risk being so categorical about the design of the novel – especially since so much of its greatness is tied up with its elusiveness. The Good Soldier is both ‘grotesquely comic’ and, in places, almost unbearably tragic: few will complete it unmoved. In Dowell’s opinion, it is a story which has neither ‘elevation’ nor ‘nemesis’ nor ‘destiny’ nor ‘villain’, but for most contemporary readers it will have more than enough tragic substance. What will surprise some readers, however, is to find themselves smiling here and there.

To sum up, Sondra J. Stang wrote with as much insight as gusto when she claimed that Dowell, far from being ‘an ignorant fool’, as he would have us believe,

is a faux-naif of the most artful kind, a pretender to innocence, a master of obfuscation, a manipulator of every trick, the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. There are overstatements, understatements, denials, lies, evasions, contradictions, accusations, exaggerations, puns, apparent irrelevancies, logical fallacies, omitted links, digressions, sharp anticipations, delayed explanations, swings of mood, and explosions great and small. He embarrasses, bullies, confuses and tests the reader; he presumes on his credulity; he cloys, simpers, condescends; he writes of ‘monstrous things’ in a ‘frivolous manner’. He spirals up and down, toward and away from his point, buries it, conceals it, flattens and misleads with false emphasis; he lurches from self-denigration to self-promotion and back; he suddenly varies the intensities and the volume and pushes himself into the story. And he repeats.22

Stang overstates her case, but nothing she asserts is untrue and many readers will find her placement of Dowell at the helm of the novel far more persuasive than the kind of interpretation which marginalizes him as a cack-handed tugboat pilot and a nincompoop to boot.

In his ‘Dedicatory Letter’, Ford says that he began writing The Good Soldier on his fortieth birthday, 17 December 1913. He thought it would be his last novel and that it would easily surpass the nineteen he had published