Top 100 Cool Novels #100, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
by Ernie on 24/07/07 at 1:03 pm
Welcome to the first installment of E-Verse’s 100 Cool Novels.
This is an informal list of E-Verse’s favorite novels written in English in the last century and is meant to be more amusing than strictly instructive. The criteria we used for selection are:
1. Popular reception
2. Stylistic influence
3. Internal complexity and formal achievement
4. Heart
5. Guts
We originally planned this as a way to thumb our noses at Time Magazine‘s top 100 novels, which we felt was incredibly dull and predictable as well as just silly.
Number 100: Parade’s End quaternary comprised of Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928), by Ford Madox Ford.
With great elegance and formal precision, Ford chronicles the passing of the Edwardian and Victorian ages and their values from English life.
It ranks with Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy of memoirs and Robert Graves’s fictional autobiography Goodbye to All That as a testament to a declining age of aristocratic privilege and shared moral certainty destroyed by the advance of science and the terrible uses to which that science was used in the First World War.
PF
Jul 24th, 2007
What’s with you and those bloody Aussies. I wouldn’t trust him, he’s bound to be dodgy.
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