It was after being 'blown into the air' by a shell near Becourt Wood in 1916 that Ford Madox Ford applied himself to finding the literary means of conveying the First World War's impact on human consciousness. 'Today simply to read 'Plogsteert' or 'Armentieres' seems to being up extraordinarily coloured and exact pictures behind my eyeballs...of men, burst into mere showers of blood and dissolving into muddy ooze', he wrote soon after his blast-concussion, 'But as for putting them -into words! No: the mind stops dead.' Nonetheless sensing his opportunity as a writer in combat, he persisted. The Parade's End tetralogy (1924-8) was the result: a novel sequence of dazzling technical skill, daring experimentation and striking originality.

Carcanet the publisher of the magnificent Millennium Ford Series, has just issued the firt of four planned volumes, Parade's End: Some Do Not..., edited by the Ford biographer Max Saunders. It is a model edition, definitive and indispensible: copiously annotated, with a full textual apparatus, bibliography of further reading and the first publication of the original ending. In his introduction, Saunders lists some of Ford's innovations: the use of suspension dots to show the charcaters 'letting their minds race around and beyond [...] words'; experiments with time shifts, the point of view and dialogue (Ford thought 'the noise of English conversation ' resembled 'the sound put forth by a slug eating lettuce'); all used to destabilize the fixity of events.

Two of Ford's technical devices stand out. Aiming at impressionistic simultaneity, he produced narratives that are not so much non-chronological as anti- clockwise: episodes are related after those they preceded. As Saunders notes, the mere 'inflexion of a verb' can create a disorientating temporal warp. Ford exploited the pluperfect tense like no other writer, manipulating its capacity to convey deep time. The second device- interruption- is part of the same attempt at simultaneity. Charcaters cut across each other routinely, but Ford's favourite agent of disruption reveals his interest in technology. In Some Do Not. . . thoughts and conversations are terminated abruptly by the ring of the telephone.