I don’t feel much compunction when abandoning a book that fails to interest me. So many fish in the sea… why bother to stick to one chosen freely and that can be equally freely abandoned? (quite another matter are the books I must read, for teaching or research… and the many I read as a student but never enjoyed). Yet, one thing is giving up on a run-of-the-mill book whereas abandoning a masterpiece seems to be quite a different matter.
This Easter holiday I gave myself as literary homework reading Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, all 836 pages. Why? Well, I just love his novel The Good Soldier (1915) –unfairly regarded as one of those second tier books that needn’t be taught– and I happen to be a sucker for anything on WWI (it’s a very rich field for anyone interested in masculinity.). And Parade’s End is a masterpiece, or so many readers and critics claim. Soooo…. about 70 pages into the first novel, Some Do not…, I realised that I had already tried reading the tetralogy years ago but had forgotten I’d given up mid-book. The problem? I couldn’t see the hero protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, and I mean in a very physical sense –he seemed to be both the manliest man ever and a fish-eyed, soft-bellied, bland slob. Above all, this being a Modernist novel, characters talk and act in the weirdest possible way (um… yes, they’re upper class!), something further complicated by Ford’s decision to narrate in odd time loops, with events being recalled in quite an oblique fashion rather than narrated in your regular dramatised scenes, Austen-style. Yet, I decided to plod on. Cultural capital and all that…
Since 20th century novelists don’t bother to describe their characters as the Victorians did, I’ve got the really awful habit of casting actors in my personal reading. This time I got lucky because by a strike of serendipity, it turns out that a TV mini-series based on Parade’s End and scripted by none other than Tom Stoppard, is being currently filmed, with Benedict Cumberbatch (of recent Sherlock Holmes fame) as Tietjens. This bit of information helped me go more smoothly through 240 of the 288 pages of Some Do not… until the moment came to make the decision to plod on for yet 548 pages (a bad sign, isn’t it?, counting pages).
I checked the Wikipedia for tips about the content of the three following books, as Tietjens, though shell-shocked, is not seen at the front in the first book, and that was what I was looking for. I checked Amazon.co.uk for readers’ opinions, and found a dismayed reader who had gone through the whole tetralogy but who, disliking the snobbish characters, felt “relief” when reaching the end. I discovered Good Reads (www.goodreads.com), excuse my monumental ignorance, where many, many readers praised to high heaven Ford’s ‘masterpiece’ while a handful despaired. After two hours of trying hard to find renewed motivation I decided to give up.
Seeing how Parade’s End is included in diverse list of the best fiction in English ever, and realising it must have been truly hard to write, I’m considering whether what we mean by ‘masterpiece’ needs to be revised to include books that are masterpieces but that are also unreadable without a great deal of perseverance. I’m not talking here about Ulysses, which I can claim to have read, ehem, or Gravity’s Rainbow, my most spectacular failure to date, but this other kind of contemporary novel which while being representative of a certain artistic, literary trend –whether Modernism or something else– no longer works and runs even the risk of becoming a relic.
I’m sure I’ll watch the TV adaptation of Parade’s End, in the hopes of returning to the tetralogy one day, but it’ll be rather for Stoppard and Cumberbatch (what a surname!) than for Madox Ford. Yet, it’s funny how instead of feeling that Madox Ford fails as a writer in his foursome I feel that I have failed as a reader. This is what trying to get a literary culture does to you. Luckily, my other Easter novel, Benito Pérez Galdós’s Miau (1888) has turned out to be as brilliant as promised by that Spanish Literature teacher who recommended it to us, students, more than thirty years ago. I’ll leave the problem of keeping reading lists for some other entry…