Ford's First World War masterpiece Parade's End is a panoramic exploration of time, history and love to rival the visions of Joyce and Proust. It follows English aristocrat Christopher Tietjens and his beautiful wife Sylvia from the decline of the Edwardian era to the end of the First World War. Now a BBC TV series adapted by Tom Stoppard.
In creating his acclaimed masterpiece Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford "wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time . . . The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war". Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and gentleman-" the last English Tory"-and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife Sylvia. A work of truly amazing subtlety and profundity, Parade's End affirms Graham Greene's prediction: "There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford".
