Response to Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"

For some reason The Good Soldier hooked me before I had even cracked the book. First, at Russell Books I got to climb the ladder in order to get it down from the topmost shelf, and I found a really good, used copy with nice, big, attractive print and a foreword. I noticed right away that at 278 pages, it is the perfect length for a novel. That is a bonus. Also, my edition has a quote from Graham Greene on the cover, calling The Good Soldier “[o]ne of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.” I have recently delved into Greene’s oeuvre and I think of him as a “novelist’s novelist”—that is to say that he is a master storyteller and a formal genius. So if he likes The Good Soldier, it must be good, right? Also, Ford Madox Ford is just a wonderful name for an author (I know it’s not his real name). So the stars were aligned for me and this book, and I was glad to see it on the reading list.

One of the most striking things, and one of my favourite things about the book, is the narrator, John Dowell, and the way he structures the story self-consciously, as if he is sitting “at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage” for a couple of weeks, telling the story as it falls out. This allows the narrative to build in a multi-faceted way and to gain in intensity as we find out more and more about this, the “saddest story”. Another quality of this style of storytelling is that the narrator forgets details, leaves things out by accident and returns to them later, gets sidetracked, and omits things about which he’d rather not speak. He is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, it seems to me. I love this aspect of Modernism, and I completely understand the impulse to distance narrative from the unnaturalness of Naturalism, and the reliability of an omniscient narrator. The 20^th Century was a century of uncertainty, of expansion, colonialism, and of global conflict. To pretend to be sure about anything would seem arrogant, especially as the characters are dashing away from country to country, continent to continent, and as people fall in love with people to whom they are not married, and conduct affairs under the very noses of their spouses and friends. Our poor, misled Dowell seems hopelessly unequal to the task of sorting out what happens, and part of the joy of The Good Soldier is sorting out the bits that he seems to resist admitting to himself and to us. Notably, he refuses to show us that he is at all emotionally distressed, and the story reads not as catharsis, but as a sort of parsing. It makes me feel sorry for Dowell.

If this story were truly a slipshod narrative, or a series of fireside fables, as Dowell believes it to be, and for which he continuously apologizes, then the reader would likely lose interest. However, I for one was gripped by the narrative to the degree that I read most of the second half of the novel in a single sitting. When I step back from the narrative and concentrate on Ford the author, I notice brilliance in storytelling that I do not come across every day. Ford seems to know exactly how much to give the reader and when. I wonder (and this can be argued both ways) whether Dowell himself is capable of constructing such a complex and engaging narrative. If the answer is yes, then he is a supremely manipulative narrator; if no, then the novel presents a logical problem about where the implied author ends and the narrator begins.  I return here to Graham Greene—the novelist’s novelist—and his admiration of Ford. I think both authors are not only great storytellers but great writers. I feel as a reader that I am in good hands: that the story will go on, and no matter how sad, nonsensical or disjointed, the journey through the novel will be the ultimate reward.