Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
by Annette Ferran
The Good Soldier
“This is the saddest story I have ever
heard.”
Who can
resist an opening line like this one?
Especially if you’ve amassed a few sad stories of your own, the
invitation to catharsis, or at least schadenfreude, is too tempting. It helps that the story that follows,
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (#31),
draws you in immediately with its sardonic tone and charmingly unreliable
narrator.
You might
think that with this title and this preamble, the story would be about war and
the noble type of sadness it engenders.
It is instead about something even sadder: personal betrayal.
The Good Soldier came out
on the eve of World War I. Its characters might not have any portent of the
upheaval the world would soon experience but they’re busy enough upheaving
their own world. The best novels
stand outside their own time as well as in it, and this is one of those novels.
Nonetheless, it’s interesting to consider the shift in perspective that would
come within just a few years of this novel’s publication, as reflected in other
novels on the Modern Library’s list. How would these characters have acted, given the same
settings and circumstances, if one or more of them had lived through the
European war fields? Would the
narrator have been able to engage the amused observational attitude and ironic
self-deprecation that he does?
It is the
telling that makes this story.
This narrator, Dowell, is not the type of observer that Nick Carraway is
in The Great Gatsby, watching thing
happen to other people. He is not
quite the astute chronicler that Jake is in The
Sun Also Rises, participating and reporting at the same time. This narrator has cast himself, with
dubious success, as a secondary character in his own story. He behaves as if it is a story
happening to someone else, when really it is happening to him. He keeps his distance from the
narrative, unnaturally and thus painfully so.
As with
many of the novels on the Modern Library’s list that stem from the first half
of the 20th century, the characters and settings in The Good Soldier belong to the privileged classes. Read enough of these novels and you
start to read this lifestyle as familiar.
Though they worry and talk quite a lot about money, no one goes to a job
every morning. They travel all
over the place. They stay in
hotels and get waited on. They
have plenty of time to think about their dispositions toward one another and to
play their elaborate game of shifting affections and allegiances.
This sad
story involves four people—an English couple and an American couple. The
American wife and the English husband both are in a fragile state of health,
which the narrator refers to as having “a heart,” presumably meaning a heart
weakened by some previous illness.
The health of these individuals brings the two couples together and they
become fast friends and companions. What happens as a result of the dynamic
among the four of them constitutes the basis for the
tragedy, this “saddest story.”
Dowell
discloses the story in a highly digressive manner. He speaks directly to the reader, like a friend who calls
you up and says, “Hey, I have to tell you what happened while I was over in
Europe this summer.” Details come
out tantalizingly slowly. First he
has to fill you in on this person’s background, then he has to describe the
particular hotel so you can picture what went on there, then he has to tell you
this other side story because it is germane to the main story. Oh, and isn’t the whole thing so
ridiculous and so sad? You are
amused and intrigued, and you couldn’t interrupt even if you wanted to.
And in
the end, this is the saddest story,
made so not so much by the facts of it but by its artful unfolding. It might not be the sad story you
expected but it has the anticipated result: it moves your heart.
Annette Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania,
and works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also an editorial assistant
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
