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Mar 12, 2016
This series of novels, spanning the years just before to just after World War I, focuses on Christopher Tietjens. Tietjens is a brilliant government statistician who volunteers for the war. You can summarize the plotline easily but it will not convey the power from his design in telling it. What actually happens in the books is revealed almost incidentally as the consciousness of the characters mull over the history and context of what is happening in order to bring meaning to the action. Ford’s process makes the nature of understanding and perception a central focus of the books. In looking at Christopher Tietjens, we see an austere brand of ancient Englishness, passive but dignified. Despite holding him up for ridicule, Ford has him succeed in impossible, changing times. Tietjens succeeds because he embraces the English countryside whose features are “pleasant and green and comely. It would breed true.” The land, having threatened to engulf him and his regiment during the war, remains the one true force that has survived and will continue to do so. Throughout the books, Ford criticizes both pre- and post-war conditions in England, some of which is personified in the Tietjens irony. Christopher seeks a foundation in the past while overlooking the full effect of it, such as the confiscation of the Groby estate from a Catholic family. The pastoral vision at the end stands at odds with the reliance on the industrialized Americans supporting it (not to mention the coal fields owned around Groby). Despite the defeats meted out to Tietjens, he survives the social and political breakdowns by turning his back on the established order and embracing a pastoral life (albeit a dark one, as alluded to in the inherent contradictions above). Ford seems deeply ambivalent about the lost society as well as the new order. Tietjens, a throwback to an era that didn’t exist as remembered, upholds many of the virtues that were supposed to provide society’s foundation. In one sense, Ford tiptoes around the problem of wishing for traditional values which were unable to deal with modern problems by pointing out that the underlying virtues were only observed in their breach. By assigning a false nostalgia he lightens the contradictions a little. Ford proves to be extremely adroit when presenting contradictions which makes it difficult to ascribe exactly what he is doing. Multiple readings, or at least varied interpretations, are possible. It’s also possible he didn’t even know what he was ultimately trying to say, which may be the most satisfying answer for me. One of my favorite books. It's a difficult read at times, but I think well worth it.