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Parade's End

Ford Madox Ford

Cover Picture of Parade's End
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Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Jan 2012)
9781847779557
£14.95 £13.45
Paperback (845 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2006)
9781857548921
£14.95 £13.45
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  • Excerpt
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  • He had stood at the hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds... He had turned and walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:

    "It's perhaps too... untidy..."

    She had said:

    "Yes! Yes... Ugly... Too... oh... private!"

    He said, he remembered:

    "But... for ever..."

     She said, in a great hurry:

    "But when you come back... Permanently. And... oh, as if it were in public." ... "I don't know," she had added. "Ought we?... I'd be ready..." She added: "I will be ready for anything you ask."

    'There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.'
    W.H.Auden, 1961

    Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which, in Graham Greene's words, tell 'the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife'. He wanted to see the book printed in one volume: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925) and A Man Could Stand Up (1926), with his afterthought, The Last Post (1928).

    Christopher Tietjens is the last of a breed, the Tory gentleman, which the Great War, a savage marriage to Sylvia, and the qualities inherent in his nature, define and unravel. Here the War's attritions offered no escape from domestic witchcraft. Opposite Tietjens is Macmaster, a Scot, different in class and culture, at once friend and foil. Here Ford's art and his human vision achieve their greatest complexity and subtlety.

    With an afterword by Gerald Hammond
    Gerald Hammond is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, author of The Making of the English Bible, Fleeting Things and other critical volumes and editor of the Selected Poems of John Skelton and of Richard Lovelace in the FyfieldBooks series.

    This volume is part of The Millennium Ford project which aims to bring all the major writings of this great writer back into circulation.
    Praise for Ford Madox Ford 'what Ford conveys above all is less his particular preference than his radical passion for the novel as an instrument and what can be done with it.'
    C.H. Sisson
    'It displays Ford's dedication to his art; it demonstrates, also, the possibilities of English prose in the hands of a master.'
    Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times
    'The Rash Act ought to be bought and read by all interested in the novel as an art form... The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented... Here in The Rash Act we have the death of morality and responsibility - a forbidding theme, but, in the paradox of art, it is made to serve a tapestry of rich colour and galloping vivacity.'
    Anthony Burgess, Observer
    'No Enemy is Ford Madox Ford's little-known First World War novel, musing and reflective, published for the first time in Britain by Carcanet and ably edited by Paul Skinner. Congratulations to them both.'
    Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 30th June 2002
    'Of the various demands... that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters in whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy.'
    W. H. Auden
    'Ford Madox Ford's Parad'€™s End, arguably the most sophisticated British fiction to come out of that war. Carcanet's reissue of the first volume, Some Do Not (£18.95), is the first reliable text, reconstructing Ford's dramatic original ending. Brilliantly edited by Max Saunders and now to be filmed (scripted by Tom Stoppard), it deserves to be€” and will be€” better known.'
    Alan Judd, Books of the Year 2010, The Spectator.
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