Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford

Last Post - Book 4 of the Parade's End tetralogy

published 1928

The boy with a voice had got himself into view towards the bottom of the bed, near Mrs de Bray Pape . . . a tallish slip of a boy, with slightly chawbacony cheeks, high-coloured, lightish hair, brown eyes. Upstanding but softish. Mark seemed to know him, but could not place him. The boy asked to be forgiven for the intrusion, saying that he knew it was not the thing…

Mark returned to the consideration of the softness of the Tietjens stock, whilst the boy gazed at him with eyes that might have been imploring or that might have been merely moonstruck. Mark could not see what the boy could have to be imploring about, so it was probably just stupidity. His breeches, however, were very nicely cut. Very nicely, indeed; Mark recognised, indeed, the tailor – a man in Conduit Street. If that fellow had the sense to get his riding breeches from that man, he could not be quite an ass...

observations: This is the fourth book in the series – for more on the other books, click on the Parade’s End label below. This one is considered to be an unnecessary add-on by some people – Graham Greene, notably, didn’t even include it as part of Parade’s End. And there is a case to be made for ending on the final line of A Man Could Stand Up: Valentine thinking

‘She was setting out on…’

A great incomplete sentence.

But in fact it is nice to have the loose ends tied up. Christopher is absent for most of the book: he has gone to Yorkshire to try to save the great tree of Groby. A lot of the book is seen through the eyes of his brother Mark, who has had a stroke and sits all day, outside but under cover, not speaking but thinking hard.

He and his French wife (formerly his mistress – you could tell they became serious ‘When his father had died he had put her into mourning’) live in Sussex along with Christopher and Valentine, doing pretty well together. The boy in the nice breeches appearing above is Christopher’s son Michael/Mark, who is heir to Groby. Their happy life in the (comparatively) small house is going to be invaded and attacked by various others, including of course the astonishing Sylvia, Christopher’s abandoned wife – a woman who pretended to be dying of cancer just to mess up her husband’s life one more time.

Everyone in the book is obstructive, you do get tired of it, though also they are like real people: annoying, inconsistent and unpredictable. And that is impressive. Tietjens comes over as something on the Aspergers spectrum to modern eyes, and so occasionally, strangely, reminds the reader both of Sheldon in Big Bang Theory, and of Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L Sayers books – he is a complete knowall, terribly clever, the most brilliant man in England. (Soooo not convincing as such). In No More Parades, Sylvia tells us what the attraction is:

It was the most damnable of his qualities that to hear any other man talk of any subject – any, any subject – from stable form to the balance of power, or from the voice of a given opera singer to the recurrence of a comet – to have to pass a weekend with any other man and hear his talk after having spent the inside of the week with Christopher, hate his ideas how you might, was the difference between listening to a grown man and, with an intense boredom, trying to entertain an inarticulate schoolboy. As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up...

The book also makes the reader think of Proust: both books resemble no other, and both take very seriously social climbing, the importance of rumour and reputation, and (also like Shakespeare) the strange motiveless malevolence that sometimes overtakes people.

The photograph is, intriguingly, of Franklin D Roosevelt in his youth, from the National Archives. He is younger than the boy in this book, but the photo seemed right.