Category: Fiction

Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis

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Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis was published in 1980. Recent events have prompted me to have a look at it again. It’s not one of his best-known novels and probably not even one of his best. It is fascinating, though, for reasons that I hope I shall make clear.

It’s a sort of science fiction novel that depicts a Britain under Russian military rule at some unspecified point in the twenty-first century, after an event referred to only as the “pacification”. The central character, Alexander, is a young Russian officer who becomes involved in a plot to undermine the government and restore rule to the British. He is an unsympathetic figure, selfish, vain and chiefly interested in his numerous affairs with women, including a rather strange mother and daughter. Character and the rather convoluted plot are not really the point here, though. What is so compelling is the believable world of a conquered Britain.

The oil is beginning to run out and cars are reserved for senior Russian officers. Horses are once more the main mode of transport for everyone else. Computers have been and gone. Everything seems dirty or degraded and there is a general air of shabbiness. Most of the trees have gone from the gardens of English country houses. Inside, the old furniture and paintings have long since disappeared.

Nothing, from clothes to alcoholic drinks is made to the standard that we would consider normal. Most people are reduced to eating a sort of peasant diet of broth and vegetables.

Everyone speaks Russian most of the time and English dialogue is printed in italics. It’s fashionable among the Russians to drop English phrases into their conversation but with no real knowledge to draw on they get them wrong, and it comes out sounding like a sort of mangled Bertie Wooster.  

We are told that there was a deliberate policy of “de-nationing”. British history and culture have been almost completely eradicated. The civilian population has no knowledge of what happened in the second world war. A festival of British culture is planned and it becomes apparent that no-one remembers Christian church services, or understands Shakespeare.

Something else that has been and gone in this world is Marxism. The Russian rulers have reverted to a sort of Tsarist autocracy. There is no moral centre in this world where both Christianity and Marxism are things of the past.

The game of the title is a variation on Russian Roulette, played with live ammunition.

It’s not really clear what Amis was up to here. On the one hand there’s a certain similarity to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, where the “Russian” slang of the teenage characters stood in for the American slang of the rock and roll era. Is it all meant to be a sort of allegory of the late 1970s when it was written, a warning about the loss of traditional British culture from a writer who was becoming increasingly conservative in his political outlook at this point? Or is it a sort of transferred depiction of the actual quality of life inside the Soviet Union at that time?

It’s not the easiest read, but a thought-provoking one. It’s a major structural fault, I think, that so much of the information about what exactly happened in the past is held back until too near the end. There is a pointed mention of the fact that the Americans did not intervene.

Too many Russian names are introduced too quickly at the beginning. Oddly enough, this is precisely the problem that English readers often have with Chekov or Tolstoy, so it rather makes me wonder whether it might have been intended as a parody.

It is compelling, though. For all its faults, I’ve read it three times.

There’s an interesting anecdote about this book in Amis’ Memoirs. It was his current book at the time he met Mrs Thatcher. On being told what it was about, she replied “No, no, no!”, indicating that whatever her other qualities, an understanding of fiction was not among them.



The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

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The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, in which large flocks of wild birds suddenly attack humanity in a systematic and highly organised way, was published in 1951. It has been somewhat overshadowed by the film that Alfred Hitchcock made from it in 1962. The story is actually rather darker than the film and read today seems startingly original, the precursor of the sort of ecological disaster science fiction produced by John Wyndham, J G Ballard and others in the later 1950s and early 1960s. It’s also been given a fresh relevance by the Covid emergency.

Du Maurier was reported not to like the film and after reading the story I can quite see why. The events are relocated to a sunny California and it all seems like a local problem. In the story, winter seems to come to the bleak Cornish landscape in the blink of an eye and it’s not clear at first if it is the weather that is making the birds behave in such an odd way.

There is a gradual, growing unease that this is not just a local problem. It turns out to be a national emergency, then perhaps a worldwide one. This progression is conveyed by the change in the radio broadcasts until the final silence. It has perhaps the darkest ending of any fiction apart from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, in which humanity is wiped out by nuclear fallout.

The story is very much of its time, the post-war era of rationing, austerity and government control. Memories of the Plymouth blitz are still fresh and the main source of news is the wireless. Could it be that the Russians are somehow responsible for the aggressive behaviour of the birds?

It’s difficult at first to get the authorities to take the reports of the bird attacks seriously. Once they do, there is a fear that they will not act appropriately. After military aircraft have been shown to be ineffective against the massed birds, it becomes clear that the farm labourer and his family are on their own and must depend on themselves for survival. Order and civilisation are fragile and have broken down entirely under the onslaught of the birds.

It’s never really explained what might have caused nature to rise up against humankind in this way, whereas the film does hint at an explanation. One can’t help feeling that this story is somehow a response to the atomic bombs and the revelations about the concentration camps, the sense of living in a world that had changed utterly, but du Maurier leaves it open for readers to make up their own minds.    

I myself think there is a link to Du Maurier’s Kiss Me Again Stranger and the idea in that story that Britain might not actually be entitled to claim the moral high ground over what took place during the recent war.   

Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James

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With Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish back on television in his third incarnation, it seems an appropriate time to look again at Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James. This is not a comprehensive survey or an academic study. It’s more of a personal reflection on her favourite genre both as reader and writer and the one in which she wrote for almost fifty years. It came out in 2009, when she was almost ninety, and I think it was her last published work.

As well as insights into her own writing, there are some very interesting views on the work of others here, and part of the pleasure of a book like this is seeing where you agree or disagree with the author. I was delighted to see that she gave some attention to Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, a personal favourite of mine that I think is rather underrated today. On the other hand, she doesn’t have much to say about the novels of Nicholas Blake, which I think is a  pity. Is this a case of damning with faint praise, or was it simply that she had not read them?

She has rather more to tell us about the four “Queens of Crime” of the inter-war “Golden Age” – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. She has clearly been reading and re-reading these writers since her teenage years. Given that she was born in 1930, she is a little bit closer to the world they lived in and brought to the page. Her observation that the “cosy” description is a later romanticisation of that era, and that English society really did feel more stable and secure then, is fascinating.

Part of the limitation of her approach is that she concentrates on what she calls the “classical detective story”, the murder mystery with a closed circle of suspects. This means that some of the most interesting books of the “Golden Age”, the psychological studies of would-be killers whose identity is revealed at the start of the story, fall outside her remit. I am thinking of Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles and The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake.

She relates the appeal of detective fiction to the Christian sense of guilt, so it would have been interesting to have her thoughts on writers who abandon this completely, such as Patricia Highsmith.

Given that she seemed such an establishment figure, it’s worth remembering that P D James was an innovator in the genre. She brought all her Home Office experience to bear, and her forensic cold-bloodedness of the descriptions of crime victims was something quite new, pre-dating Patricia Cornwell, I think. She was one of the writers who modernised the detective story with greater realism, both in setting and the details of police work. Like Colin Dexter with Morse, she created a detective who was a credible modern policeman while retaining some of the appeal of the private investigators of earlier stories. This all came together brilliantly in her 1977 novel Death of an Expert Witness, where the murder suspects were themselves a group of pathologists.

Interestingly, she says that if she were starting today she would create a female detective as her lead character. At the time she began writing, there weren’t any women police detectives so a female character would have to be an amateur. She says of Dalgleish: “I gave him the qualities I personally admire in either sex – intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence.” James did in fact write two detective stories with a young female lead but then returned to Dalgleish for the rest of her writing career, giving him a female sidekick rather than the usual male one. Perhaps this is why she so admires the writing of Sara Paretsky, the creator of private eye V I Warshawski, who “operates as a courageous, sexually liberated female investigator”.

One of James’ great talents was description and creating a sense of place. There is a wonderful example of that here, so good that it could have come from one of her novels and worth quoting in full, I think.

“East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists. The remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away by the tides of centuries and imagine that we hear the bells of ancient churches buried under the sea.”                     

The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m always aware, writing these pieces, that I’m trying to point people in the direction of stories, novels and poems they may not have read. I try to avoid spoilers as much as I can for that reason. I’m faced with a bit of a quandary here, because it’s difficult to say anything at all about The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling without giving away too much and spoiling the effect of reading it for the first time.

I’ll just say that this 1925 story of first world war bereavement is one of Kipling’s most powerful. It’s quite short for a Kipling story of this period, only about fifteen pages, and this concentrates the effect. Any selection of his best stories tends to include it, and rightly so, I think.

It was collected in volume form in Debits and Credits, Kipling’s first collection to be published after the war had ended. This also contains the stories in which members of a masonic lodge help each other to overcome the psychological scars of the conflict. One of these is the mysterious A Madonna of the Trenches. I don’t think it was an accident that The Gardener was placed at the end of the volume. 

Kipling was a successful man both artistically and financially, but his life was touched by tragedy. His daughter Josephine died of pneumonia at the age of six in 1899. His only son John was posted as missing at the 1915 battle of Loos and his body was not found during Kipling’s lifetime. Kipling later worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Gardener came out of his experience of the war and its aftermath.

There’s a sense in this story that Kipling is speaking to all those who had lost relatives on the western front. One can only imagine what it can have been like to read it when it was first published, in a world where everyone knew somebody who had lost someone.

We can be sure that the details of the visit to the Belgian cemetery are accurate. Kipling lays the scene before us with cinematic detail, the thousands of wooden crosses yet to be replaced by gravestones. How can the main character possibly find the grave she is looking for?

The last page or so of this story packs an emotional punch ensuring that once read, it will never be forgotten. Indeed, the meaning of the story depends on a single word on that last page, which inspires the immediate desire to re-read it, to make sure that one has understood correctly.

Kipling introduced many phrases to the English Language; even now he scores quite highly in a list of quotations. It’s often the case that people know the words but not who wrote them.

How many people know that he was responsible for the poignant inscription that is still visible on so many gravestones in France and Belgium?

“A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.”

An Evening’s Entertainment by M R James

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An Evening’s Entertainment is one of the less well-known ghost stories by M R James. It appeared in his 1925 collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories. The main character in a James story is often a fusty academic type, a sort of exaggerated version of himself. That is the general image of his work, but it obscures the fact that the range of characters and settings in his stories is actually rather wider than that.

Here, a James-style narrator opens the story and laments the fact that the old story books are not very specific about ghosts or folklore. He then goes on to imagine how a grandmother might tell a spooky story to the grandchildren in front of the fire before bed, hence the title. The story is indeed, in a phrase that appears early on, “a pleasing terror”.

One of the children has picked blackberries from a lane that the grandmother was told to avoid by her grandmother. Why is there a clump of fruit bushes in the lane? Because there was a cottage there once, which was the site of strange goings-on. It was inhabited by a man who didn’t work and didn’t mix much in the village. One day he brought an odd young man back to live with him. The pair were often seen out and about at all hours in the woods and on the downs above the village.

On the downs there is a human figure carved into the landscape, and many ancient burial mounds. Something the young man lets slip in a conversation suggests that on their nocturnal jaunts there, this unlikely pair are not alone. They seem to be familiar with the appearance of the people who lived there before the Romans.

This is just the beginning of a series of gruesome events, involving pagan worship, violent death, burial at a crossroads and the “lord of flies”, events long remembered in the village giving the patch of ground in the lane its bad reputation.

There are only two carved human figures in England, the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex and the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. I wonder which one James had in mind? Something about this story suggests Sussex to me, perhaps the fact that the figure is referred to as “the old man on the hill”.

James wrote in the preface to his collected ghost stories that he had tried to make his ghosts “act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore”. This particular story is almost the definitive expression of what has come to be known as “folk horror”. It shows, like many of his other tales, that James was particularly skilled at evoking the feel of the English landscape. It rather reminds me of John Masefield’s poem Up on the Downs. I also wonder whether it might have been an influence on Jocelyn Brooke and The Image of a Drawn Sword.  

The Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis

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I have written elsewhere about A Question of Proof but that was not the only school-set mystery novel by C Day Lewis. The Otterbury Incident was published in 1948 under his own name, rather than his Nicholas Blake pen name, and is aimed at readers of the same age as the characters. It concerns a group of schoolboys who take on a gang of criminals involved in the black market. It is set in the years immediately after the second world war, and the title refers to a bombsite where the boys play an elaborate war game.

If that sounds a bit like an Enid Blyton story, it is much better written, more believable and realistic. Indeed, the narrator is one of the boys. It is also quite funny, particularly when the boys dream up various schemes for making money, after one of them smashes a school window with a football and is ordered to pay for its repair by the headmaster.   

There are hints that the quiet country town of Otterbury where the action takes place is based on Sherborne in Dorset, where Day Lewis himself was a schoolboy, albeit at a rather grander school than the one described here. The town has been untouched by the war, except for one stray bomb that fell, leaving the patch of waste ground known as the “incident”.

It was the first book we were given to read in English when I went to grammar school. I was never really one for fantasy, at that young age preferring stories of people the same age as me doing interesting things. After all, the war games that the boys played in the story were rather similar to the kind of thing we got up to in the local woods. I was brought up on Arthur Ransome, of course. Indeed, I might not now be writing this if my mother had not read Swallows and Amazons aloud to me when I had measles at the age of seven. As the narrator of The Otterbury Incident speculates, where does a story begin?  

Readers of a similar vintage will remember Puffin books with illustrations by Edward Ardizzonne, and this was one of them. A note at the front reveals that it was actually a novelisation of a French film. I had not thought about The Otterbury Incident for a long time, but having enjoyed the Nicholas Blake novels so much, I started to research Day Lewis’ other writings, and discovered that I had actually read him many years earlier.

Now I have a Puffin copy, found via the internet. It is still an enjoyable read, and powerfully nostalgic for me, as it is the same edition I read all those years ago. It was out of print when I was looking for a copy, and I assumed that it was now considered rather old-fashioned. I am pleased to find it has since been re-issued as a Puffin classic, complete with the Ardizzonne illustrations, for a new generation to enjoy.

Day Lewis’ poetry is not so well known today as that of his contemporaries W H Auden and Louis Macneice. It’s strange now to think that when I read The Otterbury Incident at school, he was the poet laureate. Around that time, I went with my parents to see the film Battle of Britain. In those days, prestigious films had a printed programme, like the theatre. In the  programme for this one, there was a poem by Day Lewis, which I have been able to find, again, thanks to the wonders of the internet. I think it is very good and, like a lot of writing by Day Lewis, deserves to be better known today.

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

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Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden was published in 1939 and is an extraordinary novel. It is the story of a group of nuns who travel to the Himalayas to try and establish a convent in an abandoned palace there. Not the most promising material for a compelling story, you might think, and yet it is an intense reading experience quite unlike anything else. It’s tempting to see it as a sort of metaphor for empire, but I think it is above all a psychological novel.    

What makes the novel so powerful is that it seems to exert the same hypnotic, trance-like effect over the reader that the environment does over the nuns. The sense of place is so strong that the reader feels they have been transported to the convent in the mountains, with its bell hanging between two wooden poles at the edge of the precipice. Rumer Godden shares with other British writers who spent their formative years in India, such as Rudyard Kipling and Lawrence Durrell, a particular ability to render light and colour in words.

We are in the far north of India, beyond Darjeeling, an extreme environment in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, so high up that the nuns at first experience altitude sickness. The constant wind and the bright light reflected from the mountain snow seem to cast a spell over them so that their sense of time changes and they find themselves daydreaming. It is difficult to keep their attention on their work or their religious obligations.

Nor do the nuns understand the local people, who are more like Tibetans than Indians. Mr Dean, the local agent of empire, warns them that they must not treat any child in their clinic who is actually ill. The locals are used to children dying, he tells them, but if a child who has been treated dies later on, they will blame the nuns. He thinks the whole enterprise is doomed to fail. “I give you until the rains come”. The nuns find their beliefs and ideas unravelling as the environment overwhelms them. Sister Philippa becomes obsessed with planting flowers rather than vegetables in the garden. Sister Blanche becomes so attached to the children who come to the clinic that she longs for a baby of her own.   

Mr Dean is the only other European in the area. The nuns are dependent on him for help and his masculine presence is a disruption in other ways. They do not consider him to be a good man by their standards. He drinks too much, for one thing. He persuades the convent to take in Kanchi, a local girl who may or may not have been his girlfriend. He has “gone native” but this means that he completely understands the way of life and attitudes of the locals, and their pantheistic religion. He believes any attempt at conversion to Christianity to be  pointless. “They think God lives in the mountain”. This is emphasised by the presence of the holy man who sits motionless under his tree overlooking the convent.

There is a good deal of repressed sexuality beneath the surface here. There is a sort of battle of wills going on between Mr Dean and the Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh, but also a feeling that she is attracted to him. The deeply disturbed Sister Ruth makes no attempt to hide her feelings for Mr Dean. Another disruptive masculine presence is the young prince who comes to the convent to complete his education. He wears brightly coloured clothes and he is fond of the perfume Black Narcissus, leading one of the nuns to make that his nickname.

Sister Clodagh finds herself remembering things she has not thought about for many years. Although he looks nothing like him, the young prince reminds her of the man she thought she was going to marry, back home in Ireland. It was finding out that he intended to go to America without her that led to her decision to join the order. These memories are so strong that she is living half in the present with all its difficulties and responsibilities and half in the past. Much of the novel is seen from her point of view, so we experience her sense of memories swamping the present and this is very skillfully conveyed by Rumer Godden.

In the end, the whole situation is too much for all of them, and the mission fails, as the previous mission run by monks failed earlier. Mr Dean has been proved right. The nuns depart a year after they came, leaving the lonely grave of one of the order, their presence in the mountains destined to become just a distant memory for the locals, who will carry on much as before.   

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene’s 1943 spy thriller set during the London blitz always seems to be underrated. There could be several reasons for that. It is one of the novels that he subtitled as “an entertainment”, which is always a problematic description with his work, and an invitation to take the book less than seriously. Greene is normally thought of as a realist but the tone here is quite odd, as if the physical displacement of the blitz has caused a psychic shock as well.  

Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character Arthur Rowe, who is himself a damaged person. We gradually learn that he was responsible for the “mercy killing” of his sick wife and served some sort of sentence for it, although whether in a prison or a hospital we are not quite sure. He carries a weight of guilt about with him because of this.

Rowe’s mind moves between the reality of the blitz, his dreams, and his childhood memories. This theme of nostalgia for childhood is introduced right at the beginning,  at a charity fête taking place in a square in bombed-out Bloomsbury. It is because the stalls remind Rowe of his past that he is drawn to the fair and it is at the “guess the weight of the cake” stall that he stumbles into a dark world of espionage. He has guessed correctly and won the cake, but it becomes apparent that it was intended that the cake should go to someone else. The stall was in fact a front for a network of fifth-columnists who have been blackmailed into spying for the Germans. This atmosphere of threat and coercion into spying is “the ministry of fear”. The Nazis have imposed it all over continental Europe and now it has come to London.    

From this point on, the plot becomes very complicated quite quickly. Rowe attempts to contact the organisers of the fair to put things right, but finds himself in a sort of living nightmare. After what appears to be a murder at a séance he becomes a hunted man, fearing that his past will make him the obvious suspect. There was something valuable to the spies in the cake and an attempt is made on his life. This is prevented by the lucky fall of a bomb nearby.   

The narrative takes an abrupt turn, when, after another explosion, the scene switches to a mysterious clinic, where a man called Digby is a patient with amnesia. We slowly realise that Digby is Rowe, who has forgotten most of his adult life and seems far happier living with his memories of the world before the war. Then we find out that the doctor running the clinic was at the séance, his assistant is the man who tried to kill Rowe, and the plot starts to move towards its conclusion. 

A clue as to how we should read the novel is that Rowe is described as follows: “He felt directed, controlled, moulded by some agency with a surrealist imagination.” Indeed, the strange atmosphere of the blitz as rendered here rather calls to mind G K Chesterton’s fantastic vision of London in The Man Who Was Thursday. There is a vein of the absurd running through The Ministry of Fear, for example when we are told after an air raid that “a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’”

It is these vivid descriptions of London in the blitz that linger in the mind. “Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.”  Apart from its place in the context of Greene’s writing, it deserves to be remembered as one of the creative works recording the blitz for posterity, such as the photographs of Bill Brandt or the paintings of Graham Sutherland.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton

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It’s difficult to know where to start with this book. G K Chesterton’s 1908 novel is subtitled “a nightmare” and certainly resembles a dream rather than a conventional, realistic novel. After all, it starts with a sunset and ends with the dawn. This tale of an undercover policeman investigating an organisation of bomb-throwing anarchists has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written at around the same time, but Chesterton treats the same theme completely differently.

The members of the Central Anarchist Council are known by the days of the week, and Gabriel Syme, a poet who is in reality a policeman, manages to get himself elected to this body as “Thursday”. The president of the council is the sinister and grotesque “Sunday”, but who is he really?

The story proceeds by a succession of surreal and bizarre incidents, such as hidden rooms, chases, and confrontations to a conclusion that reveals some sort of logic was operating all along. It anticipates Kafka, whose writing career was to start some years later; perhaps of British authors of the time, it is closest to H G Wells.

Just what sort of book is it? A thriller? It’s quite short and very fast paced. Plainly, some sort of allegory is intended, but whether political, philosophical or religious, or a mixture of all three is hard to say. A lot of people have expended a lot of effort over many years to work out just what Chesterton might have meant by it all.

Chesterton was a poet as well as a writer of prose, and initially trained as an artist. It is not surprising that one of the great strengths of this book is the visual quality of the descriptive prose. The images are so striking that they lodge in one’s memory. This is particularly the case in the scenes set in London. The red-brick suburb of Saffron Park in the sunset and the relentless chase through the city streets in the falling snow are unforgettable. The effect is almost psychedelic and rather like an episode of a late-1960s TV show.

He also makes considerable use of the idea originated by Poe that the best way to keep something hidden is to leave it in plain sight.

Chesterton is best known today as the author of the Father Brown stories. His catholic priest detective is something of a riposte to Sherlock Holmes, solving crimes by intuition and knowledge of human nature, rather than logical deduction. Given that he was also a notable Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1922, it seems sensible to concentrate on the religious interpretation of The Man Who Was Thursday.

It is a peculiarly enjoyable book; the experience of reading it is quite cheering. Just when you think you know what might be going on, Chesterton throws in another twist that makes you question what has just happened. That may be why it has stayed in print, despite the difficulty of interpreting it. If you are new to the writing of G K Chesterton, though, I would recommend that you start with Father Brown, before tackling this one. 

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

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“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” That is the striking opening sentence of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel.

It is the story of the relationship between two wealthy couples who meet at a German spa town in the years before the first world war. Edward and Leonora Ashburnham are English; John and Florence Dowell are American visitors to Europe, the sort of characters we might expect to find in a Henry James novel. The health resort visits are necessary because Edward and Florence have heart conditions. At least, that is what appears to be happening, but nothing is quite as it seems in this world where the most important thing is keeping up appearances. 

It is a dark and ironic novel of adultery and betrayal; we know, from the beginning that it will end tragically. It is also one of the most fascinating novels I have ever read, a novel that reveals greater depths on every re-reading.

That is very much down to the way the story is told. The narrator is the husband of the American couple, but he does not tell his tale chronologically. He tries to piece together the complicated events by moving backwards and forwards in time. He lets slip crucial information to the reader in a seemingly casual way. “I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.”  

A major theme of the book is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else. As we read on we might think that Dowell is trying to explain himself to himself as much as trying to explain the actions and thoughts of the other characters to the reader. Just how reliable a narrator is he? He is often conveying to us, particularly in the later stages of the novel, what was told to him by others after the event – he was not actually there.

As we read on, we become aware that there is something of a mystery surrounding Dowell’s actions and the reasons behind them. Just why did he marry Florence in the first place and come to live in Europe? He has no occupation in both senses of that word. He is wealthy enough not to have to work, but has no particular interests to take up his time, and seems to drift through life. There is the occasional hint of something rather darker about his personality. Is he quite the innocent dupe that he wants us to believe him to be?

The overall effect is a bit like Henry James without the reserve. It’s not sexually explicit, yet it is quite clear when sex is being referred to. It’s quite striking that some of the characters have an innocence about physical matters that is hardly imaginable today.

The title was not Ford’s choice. He had originally intended to call it “The Saddest Story”, but his publisher considered that title unsuitable during the first world war. The new title focusses the reader’s attention, perhaps too much, on the character of Edward Ashburnham himself, “the good soldier”, distracting us from the fact that this is as much Dowell’s story as Ashburnham’s. By the end, even that opening sentence can be interpreted as slightly misleading.  

I will leave the last word to Dowell. “Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.”