The Good Soldier

"It really is a sad story, about four people – two couples – who are at a German spa resort and dance what Ford calls a “four square minuet”. They are a kind of microcosm of the upper middle class social scene in Europe before the First World War, and it falls apart. There are various affairs, splittings, attractions, secrets and lies between them. One of the great tag lines of the book is that it describes “just good people”. It turns out that these are not just good people. They are people who from the outside are respectable and pillars of society. But on the inside they are seething, raging and in love with the wrong people. It’s narrated by one of these four people – John Dowell, an American. He’s the archetypal unreliable narrator in that he hasn’t understood what’s been going on and he doesn’t understand that his wife is in love with another man. A great deal has passed him by, and the book is really his attempt to narrate his own story. So, as with Jacob’s Room , it’s about what is missing from a story – about everything that is not known. John Dowell says over and over again, “I don’t know”. He’s writing this story in an attempt to understand what has happened but sometimes he just has to say “I don’t know”. That is one of the great modernist admissions. It’s the movement away from omnipotent, omniscient narrators who can tell you exactly what’s what to narrators like John Dowell, who is very fallible, quite unlikeable and simply tells you what he experienced and what he can understand in retrospect about what happened. He also tells the story in a very roundabout way, which is another great departure from the logical chronology of earlier novels. The story is almost a maze. It’s not a straight line narrative at all. Again, this is about exposing the problems of art. Ford shows us the clockwork of a story, how a story is made and that there is no authoritative version. Nobody experiences the authoritative version of events. All we have are partial, flaunted, half-invented versions of experience."