• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ambivalence becomes for [Dowell], as for Ford, a habit of sensibility: a mode of thinking about society, history, and morality. Above all, Dowell’s tone embodies, and elicits, ambivalence about the very story he is telling. Fascinated by telling stories which were at once plausible and improbable, both compelling and outrageous, in The Good Soldier Ford invented a character, Ashburnham, at once sympathetic and outrageous, whose story is told by a narrator who is both convincing and ridiculous.29

It is fitting that a tale which registers the end of so many Edwardian certainties should have first appeared in Blast, the incendiary mouthpiece of the English Vorticist movement. Entitled ‘The Saddest Story’, Ford’s ten-page excerpt from the beginning of the novel may have looked a little out of place in such an abrasively avant-garde publication, but as Robert Green has noted:

the image of the ‘vortex’ printed in the same issue of Blast and representing ‘whirling concentrations of energy’ framed by the ‘stable and self-contained’ – the basic Vorticist tenet of’internal energy and external calm’ – is suggestive of the novel’s combination of phlegm and hysteria, the presence in The Good Soldier of anarchy, fission and incest within a rigid formal structure.30

This juxtaposition of ‘internal energy and external calm’ is particularly evident in the text’s representations of the British Empire. The leisurely pursuits of a cavalry officer’s life in India, for instance, such as an afternoon’s polo or cricket, and the annual decampment of the raj to Simla, are offset by snipers on ‘the Northwest Frontier’, just as the Boers fight a guerilla war against the British in South Africa and in Ireland Leonora’s father’s tenants take ‘pot-shots at him from behind a hedge’. While the ‘Vorticist’ theme is most obviously embodied in the two couples and their seemingly ultra-steady quartet, as well as the apparently ‘quiet and ordered’ life of Bramshaw Manor in Part Four of the novel, its ‘calm pococurantism’ masking all manner of passionate intensity, it is typified, as well, in the post-hockey match ‘saturnalia’ which disrupts the normally calm rituals of Nancy’s convent school. It assumes a polite guise in the polo game involving Ashburnham and Count Baron von Lelöffel (where Anglo-German imperial rivalry quickens the sporting encounter) and it takes a potentially more volcanic form when Florence’s disdain of Irish Catholics is met by Leonora’s silent fury.

One way or another the old order is under attack from modernity on many fronts in the novel, whether it be in the form of the Kilsyte girl and her courtroom victory over a county squire or Ashburnham’s ‘Nonconformist adversaries’ who seize on the case for political gain. The period leading up to the publication of The Good Soldier was one of serious political, industrial, social and cultural unrest in Britain – the suffragettes, for example, had been in full cry – and the novel’s predominantly wistful mood reflects Dowell’s nostalgia for the era of early-Edwardian high style which this period of disruption brought to an abrupt end. Dowell’s sympathies clearly lie with the old order, but the old order, we see, is doomed, just as Nancy’s ‘stable and self-contained’ view of marriage is sent into a spin by the ‘whirling concentration of energy’ which is released when she reads about the Brand divorce case.

With the exception of his Fifth Queen trilogy (The Fifth Queen, 1906; Privy Seal, 1907; and The Fifth Queen Crowned, 1908), Ford had not had much success as a novelist prior to the publication of The Good Soldier. He would go on to receive some acclaim for his post-War tetralogy, Parade’s End (Some Do Not, 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up, 1926; and Last Post, 1928), but it is The Good Soldier on which his reputation mainly rests. In 1915, however, while its artistry impressed some of the more astute reviewers, its subject matter dismayed many more. ‘The portrayal of marital infidelity is