The Good Soldier
Title: The Good Soldier
Author: Ford Madox Ford
294 pages
Rating: 3/5
The Good Soldier is a story about two married couples that stay together during their summer seasons. John Dowell is the narrator who tells the story as a conversation; he imagines himself sitting with the reader and telling the important events of his relationship with his wife, Florence and their relationships with Leonora and Edward Ashburnham. There is no chronological progression as the narrator jumps around, digressing for many pages at a time and tells things as they come to him - some of which he doesn’t even know are true. Florence and Edward both have “heart” conditions and need rest, but the majority of the characters in the book go through adultery, affairs, deceit; there are also money problems and the reader learns about all of these things from the marriage of both couples to certain characters’ deaths.
The story itself is interesting. In the beginning, the narrator acts as if it’s a happy love story with good characters and it’s just “the saddest story ever told.” It’s readily apparent that this was not how things were, though John Dowell wasn’t aware of everything going on as it happened. He only learned of certain events and conversations after everything was crumbling apart. This is definitely not a typical story but it’s set in the early 1900’s in British (and American) society, so the standards and morals are much different from now.
Getting into part IV of the novel, things really began to slow down. Not much changed but after 200 or so pages of the same thing told in the same way, it starts to get difficult to push through. The ending isn’t climatic; you don’t miss anything, really, and the jumping around can get confusing. The style is definitely hard to keep up with at times because Dowell talks about so much in a random order that I just couldn’t remember everything that happened. So when he refers back to something he started 30 pages before (and digressed the whole time in between), it’s a bit off putting. I did like the originality of that aspect, as well as the work it must have took Ford to be able to accomplish this.