Some Do Not ...: Parade's End, Volume I

By Ford Madox Ford

“The best novel by a British writer . . . It is also the finest novel about the First World War” – Anthony Burgess

Some Do Not … is an unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society facing catastrophe, as the energies of sexuality and power erupt in madness and violence.

Some Do Not

• Language: English
• Publisher: Woolf Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925788204

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

Reviews for Some Do Not ...

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not entirely convinced by this. It's set both before and during WW1 and revolves around a gentleman of good family called Tietjens. The characters are of a type that is almost impossible to imagine now, but that's not to say that they are not interesting, flawed human beings. I listened to this and the thing I found most annoying about the overall style was that it was almost all in either dialogue or internal dialogue and the narrator continually having to interject with "he said, she said" really got very intrusive, to the extent that i started listening out for them, not what the characters were saying. Maybe this would be better being read. There were some lovely descriptive touches and some of the passages were entrancing, but the characters seems to take great delight in misinterpreting or misunderstanding every situation they could possibly think of. This is the first of 4 parts, I may give the next a go in print.

[kukulaj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I start a novel like this with some trepidation - some modern writers like this get so experimental with style that I just can't follow what's happening. Here Ford is definitely playing with the same modern style features - quite a bit of stream of consciousness, primarily. But he provides enough clues to keep the reader oriented so I was never totally lost at sea.Ford does a splendid job here of mapping out class and gender mores around the start of WW1. The whole plot is quite small: married Christopher Tietjens meets young Valentine Wannop and they fall in love. But this gets examined from a wide variety of perspectives across complex networks of relationships. The whole thing is richly human.