Customer Reviews

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was in a bookstore and picked a copy of this novel up, and from the second I read what I later learned was a famous first sentence (and justifiably so)--"This is the saddest story I have ever heard"--I knew I had to read it. What is truly sad about the book is that the narrator has no conception of where the tragedy in the book lies. While he is articulate and seemingly insightful in his analysis of others, he remains blissfully unaware of his own enormously failings, both in morals and in character. It is indeed a very sad story, but the narrator leaves out the fact that he is quite possibly one of the most pathetic characters in all fiction.

If one prefers one's narrators and ostensible heroes to be truly heroic and sympathetic, then this novel will not please. If one, however, can imagine enjoying a novel written with J. Alfred Prufrock as the narrator and central character, then one is in a position to appreciate THE GOOD SOLDIER.

The novel is not a page-turner. If you read this novel quickly, you have read it wrongly. The beauty of the book is the exquisite prose, and should be read slowly, savoring each sentence and each sentiment. There is a dreamlike (one could say nightmarish) quality to the book, and one will most enjoy it by allowing oneself to become entranced by the atmospheres summoned up.

If you are willing to take the novel on its own terms, with its unheroic and unadmirable characters, with its pathetic elements and situations, and its subtle psychological observations, then there will be few reading experiences that will match THE GOOD SOLDIER. One of the most remarkable novels of the past century. But if you only like novels where there is a definite hero and admirable characters, you probably wouldn't enjoy this very much.

One of the greatest examples of the spoken-word novel, The Good Soldier succeeds where authors as great as Conrad have failed. Our narrator does not tell a straight, linear story. No. He forgets things, comes back to them later, revives a subject you thought dead and meaningless only to shed new light on it and make it important.

Perhaps the greatest effect the book has is the after-taste. When reading the book, I found it slow and boring. Once I set it down, though, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I had to read it again. And once I began again, I found myself reading it slowly once more, though not from boredom, but rather because I wanted to savor it and take it all in.

I encourage anyone who has begun this book only to find themselves tired of it rather quickly to stick with it. You'll be glad you did. You'll find yourself buying copies for friends to read, as I do. This book truly gets under your skin.

This novel broke new ground when it was written, something in these jaded days that is almost impossible to do. Ford created an unreliable narrator and also wrote about the complex inner workings of relationships, an area of darkness that will always be immune from full enlightenment. His characters also deceive themselves as well as significant others, and yet are always in pursuit of the perfect appearance. The subtlety with which Ford has woven this tapestry makes you think twice and then three times about who his people are and what they want. Unbridled lust also rides through the book, but is forever reigned in by double standards and self-torturing conscience. Although the book requires a patient reader so that it can bloom, its payoff stays with you, and its sharp observations and lack of sentiment make you realize what a brilliant piece of art it is. As such it is not subject to becoming dated or stale, a true test of its merit. I recommend it to anyone looking for a great work.

Don't get caught up in a reading that doesn't get beyond the most shallow interpretation of events and phrasing. This apparently casually written work is a masterpiece of finely thought out detail. While deconstruction can be pointless, taking irony at face value is just as futile.

It seems like a book about Leonora and Edward Ashburnham as told by a naive and passive friend, John Dowell. In reality, it is the transformation of John Dowell as he makes sense of his world after shattering information. His entire sense of reality has been undermined by the knowledge that the past 13 years 6 months were established in lies.

The structure of the novel is deceptively simple. His retelling of past events masks the fact that the action of telling the story occurs in the present. Dowell tells us he has been writing for 6 months, he goes away for 18 months, returns, and then finishes the last two chapters. The lack of a fixed time frame for the narrated histories of the major characters again blurs time. And then there is the fact that there are several layers of story. There is reality, which we can never know. There is what Dowell believed was reality, of which he gives some description. There are the stories from various points of view that Dowell was told and then digests and retells to us. Then there is the present action of Dowell's changing self. All of these except for the last, are filtered through Dowell's narration. The last is exposed through his narration. In this work we have one of the finest examples of the Impressionist style of writing, as well as the Modern.

Dowell is a recovering innocent. His identification with Edward is not absurd or insane, but the yearning of an innocent and a romantic for a perceived ideal that has been destroyed by a world that cannot nourish or understand it.

Of course, this is a simplistic and narrow description that doesn't even get into the pre-WWI aspect of the novel and the August 4 controversy. Suffice it to say that the book is incredibly rich and there are no wasted words. Read it, it is worth it.

This novel broke new ground when it was written, something in these jaded days that is almost impossible to do. Ford created an unreliable narrator and also wrote about the complex inner workings of relationships, an area of darkness that will always be immune from full enlightenment. His characters also deceive themselves as well as significant others, and yet are always in pursuit of the perfect appearance. The subtlety with which Ford has woven this tapestry makes you think twice and then three times about who his people are and what they want. Unbridled lust also rides through the book, but is forever reigned in by double standards and self-torturing conscience. Although the book requires a patient reader so that it can bloom, its payoff stays with you, and its sharp observations and lack of sentiment make you realize what a brilliant piece of art it is. As such it is not subject to becoming dated or stale, a true test of its merit. I recommend it to anyone looking for a great work.

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.

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."

Like another reviewer I too bought this book because it was on a list of the top 100 books of the twentieth century. But it sat on the shelf for a while because I didn't like the look of it from an instinctive perspective. Being from a different time and by an English author, I was intimidated. I thought I would have a hard time getting past the language of the book, and I thought I would be bored. I mean come on, how many times have we heard about an English restoration piece in which there is some deep and horrible scandal amongst the English well-to-do in the late nineteenth century, and it turns out pretty mundane by modern standards.
But in The Good Soldier it isn't the scandalous behavior of the characters that makes this a fascinating read, it is the amazing narrative voice of John Dowell. Ford's accomplishment with The Good Soldier is not in the creation of an incredible story. The story to me seems more like garnish to the main attraction. What makes this a masterful work is Ford's creation of a storyteller. John Dowell as a storyteller is so complete and real. Oh I don't mean the details of his life or the veracity of his character or morals. It is John Dowell's voice that makes this book a classic.
After reading different reviews and analysis of the book after I read it I noticed how many people seem concerned with the trustworthiness of Dowell's story. Personally I don't understand why it's important. If I were indeed sitting beside him in a country inn in front of a roaring hearth, trying to pass the night while the weather had its way with the night outside - a scene Dowell suggests and I found myself in quite easily while reading - my concern would be for the method and the gripping nature of his storytelling. I would not only accept, but also expect embellishments, exaggerations and one-sidedness. But of course unless he were a mad sea captain I would also expect him to admonish himself for doing these things and to seem sincere and to seem to consciously be making an effort to tell the whole story, even when it embarrassed himself. People have mentioned the way Dowell says that "this is the saddest story I've ever heard" and how it seems an odd thing to say if one is in the story and not hearing it. I however like to imagine him saying this in front of the aforementioned fire (after dinner when all the other guests have already turned in for the night) as a beginning to the story he's about to tell, placing himself in the roll of one of the characters (perhaps to make the story more interesting, and perhaps because it really did happen to him). Ford's magic is in making a man who tells a story in a book, exactly as you would expect him to tell you in person. You can't tell for sure what's true or not; when you've caught him in a lie and when he's just made a mistake because he's tired.
The Good Soldier succeeds because a not very interesting man tells a not very interesting story in a truly real and interesting way.

I think this is the first novel I've ever read twice. It's an odd choice for that, as it's not my favorite. I read it in college at the recommendation of my creative writing professor, who thought it might be helpful in structuring a story on which I was working. And the structure, more than anything, is the most innovative part of the book. An example of literary impressionism, the narrator paints the story with small brush strokes, a scene here and there, out of order, from different perspectives. He examines each character individually, because it is more about the characters and their motivations than it is about the plot. It is left to the reader to put the pieces together--the narrator gives more of an impression than a complete picture.

But THE GOOD SOLDIER is #30 on The Modern Library's top novels of the 20th century, which means that it must have more than just structure. I have to admit that, until I got to the very end, both times I read the book, I wondered what the allure was. The book's first sentence is "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." But throughout, I kept getting the feeling that it was little more than a jumbled romantic melodrama. The characters are all flawed in ways that makes them real but not particularly likable. They are all extremely well off, which makes their dismal state even more frustrating--these people have everything--Why aren't they happy? But then in the end, somehow--and maybe it's just the last few pages that do it--I realize that these characters are great. Particularly Edward Ashburnham, the soldier of the book's title, is a very likable character. And we're almost willing to overlook his one vice--his womanizing--partly because he's such a sentimentalist but mostly because his wife is such a wretch, the only truly wicked character in the book.

As for the plot, it's almost not worth detailing. As I said, it's more about the characters and how the plot is structured than the plot itself. There are five principle characters: Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, John and Florence Dowell, and Nancy Rufford. Two commit suicide, one goes crazy, and the other two suffer perhaps the worse fate of living completely plain, boring, lonely lives. In the end, it is a very sad story, if for no other reason than that most of it is so unnecessary--with the exception of Leornora, any of these people could have lived happy lives if it weren't for each other.

The Good Soldier has all the tension and fragility of a balloon filled with twice the amount of air it's supposed to hold. It is a howling, subversive, gut-bustingly funny piece of bathroom graffiti masquerading as a quaint book of manners. Do yourself a favor and read it immediately!