The Good Soldier – A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The English writer with the humorously redundant name, Ford Madox Ford (real name Ford Hermann Hueffer), wrote the famous and highly regarded twentieth century novel, The Good Soldier, around 1915 (that’s when it was first published). The novel’s subtitle, A Tale of Passion, suggests that there is more drama and tragedy in the novel than there is. While there are suicide, infidelity and madness, to be sure, the whole thing is narrated in a humorous fashion in the first-person voice of John Dowell, one of the four major characters. John Dowell is an American millionaire and his wife’s name is Florence. The Dowells are gadding about in Europe, seeking curative waters in Germany, where they make the acquaintance of one Edward Ashburnham and his wife, Leonora. (Edward Ashburnham is the soldier referred to in the title.) While the Ashburnhams appear to be “good people” on the surface, John Dowell and his wife soon discover, as they are drawn into the Ashburnhams’ world, that all is not as it seems.

Edward Ashburnham is good-looking and rich. Since he is of the “idle” class (he doesn’t have to work for a living), his main preoccupation is having affairs with inappropriate women. It doesn’t seem to concern him that the women are already married or underage; no matter the circumstances, he is swept away by passion. His wife, Leonora, who is possibly insane, doesn’t approve of her husband’s many love affairs. She is a Catholic and Catholics don’t believe in divorce, so she will have to stay married to him, no matter how many women he has on the side. She turns out to be a reprehensible shrew and, ironically, is the only character in the novel who ends up happy and satisfied.

Mild-mannered and seemingly innocent John Dowell (the novel’s narrator) seems to have missed something when it comes to his wife, Florence. (They had a sort of arranged marriage in the first place and really don’t like each other very much.) John is surprised to discover that Florence fakes a heart condition so she can stay put to continue her clandestine affair with a repulsive young man named Jimmy. Later on, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to John to learn that Florence has become one of Edward Ashburnham’s female “conquests.” Edward just can’t seem to help himself when it comes to women. Late in the novel he develops an attachment to an innocent (knows absolutely nothing about life) young girl named Nancy Rufford, and it is this attachment that proves his undoing, as his wife schemes in the background to keep him from having what he wants.

The Good Soldier is an unconventional novel in that it is told mostly in flashbacks and moves around from one time period to another. It’s set in the early 1900s over a period of nine years or so. Being a product of its time, there is no sexual content, even though one of its main themes is infidelity. If marital relationships and infidelity are not your cup of tea (they certainly aren’t mine), the novel is diverting enough, short enough, and easy to read enough to make it worthwhile. It’s easy to pick up and easy to put down. If you are making your way through the best-known, best-loved and most famous novels in English of the twentieth century, then you could do a lot worse. You could take a stab at James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which to me is all but unreadable.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp