The classic tetralogy Parade’s End a.k.a. the Tietjens Tetralogy scares me because frankly I have to work hard to keep
track of the interweaving of the novel’s past (before WWI) and present (during
WWI) and the thoughts of the characters as the acts and respond to change. I
thought that re-reading the novel’s one after another (not the way I read them
about 3 or 4 years ago) might help keep track of the order of events better.
No More Parades
– Ford Madox Ford
The second novel in the Parades’ End tetralogy is set in
the transit camp at Rouen. The first section of the novel details the efforts
of the hero Christopher Tietjens to move Canadian troops to the front. The
endless bureaucratic muddle exhausts both the hero and the reader. When
frustration reaches these heights for protracted stretches of time, it is no
wonder that officers lose their minds, as the mad subordinate McKechnie shows. But the pessimism discourages deeply:
Heavy depression settled down more heavily upon him. The distrust of the home Cabinet, felt by then by the greater part of that army, became like physical pain. These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pygmies! It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in shambles. But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without confidence, with depressed brows: without parade...
The second part of the novel is the story of Sylvia
Tietjens and why she treats her husband Christopher so monstrously. She glories in
fantasies in which she behaves in ways that will make him wince. She feels satisfied when she carries these fantasies out and when she does terrible things just on a whim. She also feels
a sexual longing for Christopher that passes her own understanding. She loves him, but she's has a troubled soul.
Christopher had spoilt her for the other man. 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 week-end 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...Wondering if any guy anywhere has been That Guy to any woman anywhere calls into doubt whether Chris is a believable character. Chris' compassionate conservatism is as hard to believe as Sylvia's baddishness. But Sylvia is totally believable as the kind of of passionate person who can love to no end - but can hate and damage to no end too when they think, rightly or wrongly, they've been messed with.
Tietjens can find no peace: While he trying to organize a replacement battalion for an important mission, he receives the news that his wife is on his way to the French war zone. As Sylvia arrives at the front camp, which is overcrowded by wounded, freezing and emaciated soldiers, she assails her husband with a barrage of slander and insinuations. Tietjen's superior can prevent a scandal oly by sending him back to the front lines where life expectancy is about six weeks.
Thus the third part is taken by the narrative of Tietjens
having it out with his superior, General Campion. The general doesn’t like
brilliant people because their explanations point out where he is wrong. This makes
him feel inadequate. Campion is also amazed when Chris lays this on him:
"You generally find the
things I say come true, sir. Could we get this over? Ruggles told my father
what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or
eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to
have taken one's public-school's ethical system seriously. I am really, sir,
the English public schoolboy. That's an eighteenth-century product. What with
the love of truth that—God help me!—they rammed into me at Clifton and the
belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins—the vilest of all
sins—is to peach to the head master! That's me, sir. Other men get over their
schooling. I never have. I remain adolescent. These things are obsessions with
me. Complexes, sir!"
The first third of this novel was extremely hard going because of the stream of consciousness. But Sylvia is such a compelling character, exhilarating in her bad ways that the reader marvels, Will she stop at nothing? This makes the novel hard to put down.
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