I read this book for a class 30 years ago, forgot about it, and then saw it on a list of the top 100 novels of the 20th Century. This is a wonderfully constructed, thoughtfully written, and facinating story. Independent of the story and the issues of change and transformation thematically dominating the book; the style and prose are intriquing and creative. An easy read well worth the time to revisit or discover new.

Don't get caught up in a reading that doesn't get beyond the most shallow interpretation of events and phrasing. This apparently casually written work is a masterpiece of finely thought out detail. While deconstruction can be pointless, taking irony at face value is just as futile.

It seems like a book about Leonora and Edward Ashburnham as told by a naive and passive friend, John Dowell. In reality, it is the transformation of John Dowell as he makes sense of his world after shattering information. His entire sense of reality has been undermined by the knowledge that the past 13 years 6 months were established in lies.

The structure of the novel is deceptively simple. His retelling of past events masks the fact that the action of telling the story occurs in the present. Dowell tells us he has been writing for 6 months, he goes away for 18 months, returns, and then finishes the last two chapters. The lack of a fixed time frame for the narrated histories of the major characters again blurs time. And then there is the fact that there are several layers of story. There is reality, which we can never know. There is what Dowell believed was reality, of which he gives some description. There are the stories from various points of view that Dowell was told and then digests and retells to us. Then there is the present action of Dowell's changing self. All of these except for the last, are filtered through Dowell's narration. The last is exposed through his narration. In this work we have one of the finest examples of the Impressionist style of writing, as well as the Modern.

Dowell is a recovering innocent. His identification with Edward is not absurd or insane, but the yearning of an innocent and a romantic for a perceived ideal that has been destroyed by a world that cannot nourish or understand it.

Of course, this is a simplistic and narrow description that doesn't even get into the pre-WWI aspect of the novel and the August 4 controversy. Suffice it to say that the book is incredibly rich and there are no wasted words. Read it, it is worth it.

The Good Soldier is woefully underread, and it fully deserves its somewhat belatedly-restored status as a true classic of 20th c. English literature. Ford Madox Ford, a friend and collaborator of Joseph Conrad, lays out a deceptively simple, almost trite, plot, one which we first think we've heard a dozen times before. But the beauty of this book is in the telling. Ford's narrator is piecing together the events of the past decade as he tells the story, and as such he jumps back and forth over the course of the last ten years, offering glimpses of events yet to come, going back and re-telling accounts of events he's already shared (though always with a new twist and revelation). In essence, the narrator is "learning" the story along with the reader, and he never (if ever) truly "understands" what's happened till the very end. Ford shatters forever the old 19th c. English novel where good and evil are absolute polar opposites, where characters unfailingly embrace either one or the other pole, where decency and "good" almost always prevail in the end, and where characters are immediately transparent (take Dickens, for example: a paragraph or two and you know all you need to know about each and every character he introduces; whether they're "good" or "bad," etc.) Ford uses the genre of the novel to create a work of literature where art mirrors real life. His characters are never what they seem at first meeting, events are fraught with deep hidden meanings that bubble beneath the surface, and there are three sides to every story. Beautifully written with moments of sparkling wit and levity, it is also an emotionally draining work that tackles love (versus what simply goes by the name) and propriety (versus what society says is proper). You'll want to flip back to the first chapter and re-read it from page one, knowing then what you know by book's end. A true masterpiece which I cannot recommend highly enough. This particular edition from Everymans Library is particularly handsome and well-bound, with insightful introductory essays by thoughtful critics (which, needless to say, should be read after the novel itself).