I think it could be argued that Last Post was more than a mistake – it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End. The sentimentality which sometimes lurks in the shadow of Christopher Tietjens, the last Tory (Ford sometimes seems to be writing about ‘the last English gentleman’), emerged there unashamed... This is a better book, a thousand times, when it ends in the confusion of Armistice Night 1918 – the two lovers united, it is true, but with no absolute certainties about the past so deformed by Sylvia’s lies (if they are lies) or about the future with that witch-wife still awaiting them there...

Parade’s End is not a war-book in the ordinary sense of the term; true, it was produced from the experiences of 1914-18, but while a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front confined its horror to the physical, to the terrors of the trenches, so that it is even possible to think of such physical terrors as an escape for some from the burden of thought and mental pain, Ford turned the screw. Here there was no escape from the private life.

Many critics down the years have pointed out that almost all anti-war novels and movies are in fact pro-war. Blood and mud and terror and rape and an all-pervading anxiety are precisely what is attractive about war — in the safety of fiction — to those who, in our overprotected lives, are suffering from tedium vitae and human self-alienation. In Parade’s End Ford makes war nasty, even to the most perverse and idle...

Graham Greene once said of Parade’s End that it was the only adult novel dealing with the sexual life that has been written in English. This is a startling superlative, but it may well be true. Certainly the book has a scope and depth, a power and complexity quite unlike anything in modern fiction, and still more unusual, it is about mature people in grown-up situations, written by a thoroughly adult man.

Parades End has been called the last Victorian novel. And I suppose it is. So much that is Victorian is in this book, and yet… there is something of the lost generation in here also. It is in my mind a transitional novel, the last hurrah of the Victorian and a first tentative peek at the modern. Or more properly perhaps, the first description of the Modern by a Victorian: “No more hope, no more glory, not for the nation, not for the world I dare say, no more parades.”

Those who have read The Good Soldier will recognize some familiar themes, but in Parade’ End will enjoy Ford at his most expansive. Why Ford has fallen so out of favor, and this novel in particular has been all but forgotten, is one of those peculiarities of taste and time.

Ford himself once said, “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal; the very best and the very worst.” It is certain that Parade’s End belongs in the former class. Certainly it will again be “rediscovered” by some generation of writers. It’s quality and execution demand it.