The Good Soldier

The saddest story ever told about the most deceptive people in England. Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece opens with John Dowell announcing that he has been the friend of Edward and Leonora Ashburnham for nine years, that he and his wife Florence were perfectly happy, and that nothing of any consequence ever happened. This is the first of many lies Dowell tells, perhaps the first lie he tells himself. What follows is a devastating excavation of four people trapped in a house of cards they built around themselves: Edward, the handsome soldier beloved by all, whose "goodness" masks a ruinous compulsion; Leonora, his long-suffering wife who has made peace with degradation; Florence, John's wife, who may or may not have been sleeping with Edward; and Dowell himself, a man so disconnected from his own emotions that he narrates his own cuckolding with serene obliviousness. Through fragmented, non-chronological flashbacks, Ford constructs what Graham Greene called the finest example of literary impressionism in English, a novel where everything happens off-stage and all the passion lives in the spaces between what is said and what is meant. It has been called the greatest French novel in English, which is another way of saying it is the most ruthless dissection of English hypocrisy ever written.