The Good Soldier is a good debate

What an excellent book group read Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier turned out to be; views on it diverged so sharply that we had A Good Debate last Tuesday evening at Alison's. Those who liked it really liked it .....and, as one of those who was less enthusiastic, I was left feeling rather shallow for my lack of appreciation of the book.

It is an old fashioned read, that's for sure, but at the time (written in 1915 and set a little earlier) it must have been both shocking in content and ground-breaking in form and style. We are used to and are comfortable with novels which are non-chronological and which use flashbacks to tell a story and so, perhaps, it is this familiarity with form which makes it easy to underestimate the novelty and achievement of The Good Soldier.

Whilst I didn't much care for any of the characters, I admit that there is something intriguing about Dowell, the narrator, since he is manipulated by virtually everyone else and his naivety is staggering. He too is a device; he is unreliable (not necessarily a good thing in a narrator) and as the story of the web of disintegrating relationships between Dowell, Florence, Edward and Leonora unfolds nothing is as Dowell has originally revealed to us.

We agreed that by setting his characters in an aimless vacuum of European spas with no need to earn a living and no family to distract them, Ford isolates them and allows them to be morally and spiritually lost (and, as a result, completely dishonest with each other). With no outside forces, the reader realises early on that they are unsympathetic characters on a destructive course..... the book's opening sentence sets it up: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard".

We meet again on 28th November at Sally J's when we will be discussing hopefully happier themes having read Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, a novel inspired by Henry James by a writer who worshiped him. It is a choice which met Alison's challenge of finding a book which starts with a letter.