The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Penguin Classics) [ペーパーバック]

Although this has the reputation of an antique, buy it immediately. Stephen King never wrote such a horrifying novel--it's about the savagery and madness than lay behind the thin surface of ordinary, polite society. In it, Ford virtually invented the "unreliable narrator" and raised the question: how do we know what anyone tells us is true? Jim Thompson's psychotic protagonists are unimaginable without this deceptively genteel predecessor.

The Good Soldier may not force you to reevaluate your life or question your morality, but it will prompt you to think about that curious barrier/nexus between reader and story that is the first person narrator. For me, this book's defining feature is its style of narration: non-linear, with the narrator jumping back and forth between earlier and later episodes and then returning to expatiate and fill in details. While this may sound convoluted or annoying, it makes sense when we think about how people tell stories in real life--we get excited, we skip around, we go back to embellish a bit more and most importantly: we wait until the end to lay our last card down.

Some may not like this style of narration and in inexperienced hands it could quickly become a crap-storm. However, Ford is simply (amazingly) that good: the story never escapes his control for a moment, and while Dowell seems to drop details accidentally, Ford precisely governs the moments when he will allow Dowell to reveal vital information. And some of those "slips" are like verbal punches--they have the ability to stun you, to make you reread what you just read because you simply cannot believe what has happened. Only a few books have made me feel as though I'd been slapped in the face, and this is one of them (trust me, it's a good thing).

Now, my other reason for adoring this novel is the narrator himself. The Good Soldier's heart and soul, its "core," so to speak, is its concern with perception. The Modernists were quite interested in epistemology (how we know what we know) and Ford was not an exception. Ford filters the entire story through the consciousness of Dowell, a man who (as some incredibly astute readers have noticed) is dull, wimpy, and unlikable. But we don't initially read The Good Soldier to learn more about Dowell. We read to learn about Edward Ashburnham (the titular hero) and his interactions with his wife Leonora (a powerful female character) and the antics of Dowell's scheming wife Florence. Which brings us to Dowell's most important quality: his unreliability. The analogy of the "goodly apple" prompts Dowell to ask in so many words: "If for nine months I possessed a goodly apple, and only at the end discovered that it was rotten, isn't it true that for nine months I possessed a goodly apple?" Some would say yes, others no, but the analogy is clear enough: the same story will look different through the eyes of any person; some will notice the rottenness from a distance while others will only taste it in their mouths. Dowell, to our most excellent fortune, is one of the latter. As readers we are obliged to look through his eyes, and try our best to understand what "really" took place. Is there a way to know? Not really, and some have called the book cynical in this regard. But the vein of cynicism runs deep in modernist literature, and I think it is fairer to say that TGS is astute and unflinching concerning the realm of objective truth.

Let's talk about pacing. The Good Soldier starts slowly, but gradually gains momentum with the development of character, the strange plot twists and the final dénouement. Towards the end, I had to force myself to slow down and read carefully, rather than plunge ahead and trip over the lines. While the latter may be an acceptable reading pace for a John Grisham novel or one of the later Harry Potter books (Order of the Phoenix, anyone?), failing to miss a few words of Ford's prose could damage the reader's experience. You only get your first time once, as they say, so take care and enjoy!

This is not war fiction. It is a soap opera, of rich people who subsume their longing, fear, religion, everything, to decorum. Narrated by a hollow man -- Holden Caulfield of the upper-crust, minus the sharp wit. It's all bitterness and sigh-heaving -- a man sits next to you at a bar and starts talking, with the following first sentence, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." He talks and talks, he's not a slick storyteller but you listen -- it's a sad story largely because the storyteller is sad, as in pathetic, and you become more fascinated in him than in his story (which you suspect is grotesquely slanted to his point of view anyway).

There's a British couple and a British-like American couple. There's an affair, there's a suicide, there is lots of falsity. Only main events are narrated, and the narrator digresses, digresses and describes the mental states of his characters: so you're left with thin characterization but vivid impressions. I could not relate to the rich, British ways of the characters; and there are subtleties of religion -- Catholic vs. Protestant -- which are over my athiest head. It is Henry James-like, in its abstruseness as to what the heck is at stake for the characters, but witten in a looser style at least.

The novel was written in 1913. Ford wanted "to show what I could do" -- because -- "I had never really tried to put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing." But he goes on to say (in a preface), "the story is a true story...I could not write it till all the others were dead."