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Title: The Good Soldier
Author: Ford Madox Ford
Narrator: Ralph Cosham
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-10-12
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 128 votes
Genres: Classics, American Literature
Publisher's Summary:
The Good Soldier is a story about the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples - one English, one American - and the growing awareness of American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian façade. It is Dowells attitude - his puzzlement, uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration - that makes the book so powerful and mysterious. In Fords brilliantly woven tale, nothing is quite what it seems.
Despite its catalog of death, insanity, and despair, this novel has many comic moments and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Originally published in 1915, The Good Soldier is considered by many to be Ford Madox Fords masterpiece.
Ford Madox Ford (18731939) was a novelist, poet, literary critic, editor, and one of the founding fathers of English Modernism. He published over seventy books in his lifetime, perhaps most famously The Good Soldier. His books often centered on the conflict between traditional British values and those of the modern industrial society.
Critic Reviews:
One of the finest novels of our century. (Graham Greene)
The Good Soldier, often regarded as his best work, reflects Fords ambivalent fascination with the phenomenon of the English gentleman. The conclusion is anticipated in the well-known opening line: This is the saddest story I have ever heard. (
New York Times)
This is the most intriguing, shocking, and original book I have ever read
The Good Soldier is the only book I have ever read and wanted to read again immediately. (
Times, London)
Members Reviews:
The Clueless Cuckold and the Romantic Philanderer
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Maddox Ford is "the saddest story" the narrator has ever heard, but because it's so well written about unlikeable characters who have been emotionally destroyed before the first chapter begins, it engrossed rather than moved me. The narrator, John Dowell, a Pennsylvania Quaker and a member of the American idle rich, is telling the tragic story of the relationships in the early 20th century Europe between himself and his wife, Florence, the relationship then between a married couple of the English aristocracy, Captain Edward Ashburnham ("the good soldier") and his wife Leonora, and the relationships between the four of them. He's telling the story in the way that people who witness disasters like "the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people" feel compelled to write about them for the benefit of future generations or simply "to get the sight out of their heads." Unsure whether to begin at the beginning and progress chronologically to the end, or to tell his imagined listener whatever comes to his mind when it comes and to fill in missing things as needed, he settles on the latter method. This makes the novel innovative for its time, an early example of modernism, though without the stream of consciousness of writers like Virginia Woolf. Dowell recounts how his wife, "poor dear Florence," was, he thought, an invalid with a heart condition that required him to live as her caretaker for the twelve years they were together, carefully monitoring all subjects of conversation to suppress any "dangerous" topics (involving religion or strong emotions or politics, etc.) so as to avoid upsetting her weak heart.
