"No More Parades" by Ford Madox Ford

No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford (1926, 212 pages-part II of Parade's End)

I am now a bit past the half way point in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy set in   the WWI era in England, Parade's End.  No More Parades takes us a few years ahead in time.   We now see Christoper Tietjens in his role as a British Army officer serving in France.   His primary job is to prepare draftees for front line assignments.   He has normally about 2800 men under his command.   he tries to be a good compassionate commander but he also is a bit offended by having to deal directly with men whose class level is way below his.   Parade's End is very much a story of class distinctions.    Tietjens is under the command of a General to whom both he and his wife are very close personally.   There is a lot happening in this part of Parade's End.   A lot of the plot action and narrative line is carried through conversations.     Some time I had to read the conversations two or three times just to figure out who is speaking.   I know that pretty much that only those very interested in FMF or Parade's End will ever read  my blogs on the work so I will not try to convey too much of the plot action-the fun is in part in trying to figure it out.

I have some sort of random observations on the work so far.   Previously I had said that I thought Parade's End could be seen as a kind of Encyclopedic Narrative (in the meaning of the term coined by Prof. Mendelson).   I now no longer think this as it does lack some of the meta-qualities of such narratives, its scope is too narrow, Tietjens'  mathematical knowledge does not really provide us the outlines of the sciences of the times (as found in both Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick).   I think part of the deeper theme of Parade's End is that encyclopedic narratives are of necessity wrong  (remember the hobby of Tietjens in finding errors in the dominant encyclopedic of his time, The Britannica) and that truth is as much subjective as objective.   If you read Parade's End and come away seeing it as a straight forward work than you for sure understood you missed the point!   Perception is created by cultural and culture by perception deepened by reading and art.   History is a set of stories to make what happens seems morally right.    

The book is for sure very political and harshly judgmental in its treatment of the causes of war and the concern of leaders for the millions who will be killed.   (FMF went to war at age 41 and had what seems to be a nervous breakdown).    It is a very interesting study of the nature of marriages particularized through the marriage of Sylvia and Christopher Tietjens-they are at perpetually loggerheads and always on the brink of divorce but each one satisfies the needs of the other in some very deep and hard to quite fathom ways.   Parade's End finds Tietjens under arrest for striking a fellow officer who behaved in an improper way toward Sylvia.   I love the conversations in Parade's End, I know whenever Tietjens speaks there is a good chance it will be something  which I can learn from or marvel at at least.   Not all of his statements  in the conversations  about art and literature  are correct  and some are said mostly as the thought of the moment  and we need to catch his errors if we can.    This is one great way the internet has helped readers-any reference to something you have not heard of can be tracked down at once.   I am also starting to see the effects of the war on our characters.    

I will admit sometimes in reading this book I am reminded of The Monty Python Skit in which there was a contest for "Upper Class Twit of the Year" .   I do not say this as a reflection on the book but it did come to mind more than once.    

I will, I think, attempt a more grandiose summery of themes and methods and such in Parade's End when I have completed the work.   FMF famously said of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education that one should  not consider themselves well educated until they had read it 14 times.    Parade's End  does remind me a lot of A Sentimental Education.   Parade's End is a very edifying book as well as superb entertainment, what more can I ask from a novel?   

I strongly urge those interested in Parade's End or FMF to read the posts on the novel at  A Common Reader

There is really so much in this novel that I do find it hard to decide what to post on it.   I have noticed that FMF has a thing for magpies!    This is a very rich book.    I will not say that it is an easy read or that one could lollipop their way through its 830 pages with much profit.   I am willing to say it is a great work of art and all who seriously try to read it will be way over paid for their time.   It also really is a lot of fun.   Most would probably tell you to read his The Good Soldier first and I guess I would also.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford -Tietjens in the Trenches

Tietjens in the Trenches -Observations on Parts I and II of No More Parades (Part II of Parade's End)

No More Parades finds our man Christopher Tietjens in the trenches in France in the opening months of  WWI (1914).   He is charge of preparing a large group of Canadian Draftees to go into battle.   He is living in the trenches.   The trenches in WWI were often quite elaborate and included officers quarters and such.   They were not simply places to stand up and fire from.   Tietjens's commanding General is his late father's best friend.   At first impression Tietjens seems like a man who would not do well in the trenches as he has had a totally pampered life and he is not at all physical fit.    Tietjens is in command of a group of Canadian draftees (colonials in his mind), 2994 men for two months time during which they will be readied for combat, trained and fitted out.   Tietjens is of several  minds on these draftees.   He is, we must acknowledge, offended to have to listen to the opinions of some of the soldiers (he feels the lower classes should not have political opinions).    He also meets a Canadian draftee who seems nearly as erudite as he is.   Tietjens has a kind of near break down shortly into his command due to his compassion for the men under him.   One of the draftees asked for a day off, Tietjens thinking he was doing the man a favor for another reason, denied the request and this ends up putting the draftee in the way of enemy fire and he is killed.  Tietjens  cannot get over blaming himself.   Tietjens is very patriotic and as British as they come but he is no fool.   Here is how he sees the origins of war:

Intense dejection, endless muddles, endless frolics, endless villainies.   All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world.   All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to put into politicians' speeches without heart or even intelligence.   Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of winter...by God, exactly as if they were nuts willfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies...But men.   Not just populations.  Men you worried over there.   Each man with a backbone, knees..a home, passions..schemes of the universe, a milk walk, a slut of a wife, a brat..The Men:  The Other ranks.  And the poor--little officers.

Note on the reference to "Slut of a wife"-Sylvia Tietjens,  his own wife is never far from the action or his mind.   In fact Sylvia even shows up at the trenches.  (It was not unusual for officers wives (for those with some money) to show up in France at the front.   Sylvia begins to try to stage manage Christopher's military career via her family connections to his commanding general.   She feels he should have a more important job.  We learn more about the complicated dynamics of the marriage of the Tietjens and get more insight into the characters of our parties.  

As I read   the  parts of No More Parades dealing with trench war fare and Tietjens thoughts on the origins of war I could not help but think of General Pudding, a minor but thematically important character in Gravity's Rainbow, and his memories of trench warfare in France in WWI.   I know devotees of Gravity's Rainbow and Parade's End may each find this remark very odd,  but I see a lot of commonality in the two books.   I might post on this upon completion of Parade's End if I still believe it after I have finished the book.

There are a number of interesting references to the 18th century in this section.   Tietjens also makes another one of his wonderful literary epigrams in declaring that there  no English literature of value written subsequent to the 17th century.   Here is how his wife Sylvia described the head of her pet dog (which for her amusement and stress relief she just beaten for no reason with a rhinoceros whip after remarking that the white dog she was whipping remind her of her husband):

A great head, room for a whole British encyclopedia of misinformation.

There are a lot of good conversations between Christopher, his wife, her priest, the  general, Christopher's brother Michael and the men under Christopher.    We may be seeing the awaking of Tietjens to the many absurdities that unpin the Empire.   (the use of the bold characters above is my idea!)

There is a really a lot in Parade's End.   Great conversations, wicked epigrams that can take their place among the best in literature.   Many wonderful cultural references, some of them brilliant some more than passing strange.    The sentences are crafted beautifully and there are themes enough for 100s of posts.  

In a prior post I pondered the question as to whether or not Parade's End should be seen as an encyclopedic narrative summing up the culture and knowledge of England in the 1910s.  Maybe it is a kind of anti-encyclopedic work suggesting the building of encyclopedias is a fools errand.   I think this is  part of the reason for the great number of cultural references in Parade's End.   


As I said when I began my Reading Notes on Parade's End the very nature of the work means that our early perceptions could be all wrong and I accept that as central to the experience of the work.  

Parade's End Reading Notes and links to posts by others in the read along.

"Some Do Not"-Part One of "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford

Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford (Part One of the Parade's End, 1924, 288 pages

Some Do Not is the opening novel in Ford Madox Ford's four part work set in the 1910s, Parade's End.   I am treating the entire tetralogy as it were artistically one work.    The four parts of the work were published in rapid succession (FMF must have been a very fast writer given his huge output)   and the limited research I have done (as well as the introduction to my edition on the work by Max Saunders, leading authority on FMF) indicated the four works were meant to be taken as a whole.   Given the nature of the work,  I have to accept that what I think I understand about Some Do Not (I completed it yesterday and have not yet begun part II) may be quite undercut by what  I will read later on.    I think that this is in fact reflective of the themes of the work that deal with the nature of knowledge, culture, literature, and relationships that our understanding of the novel is always on shaky ground.   

Some Do Not centers on the lives of the landed gentry in England in the period right before WWI begins.   We first meet two of the central characters on a train.   FMF is very careful to describe an upper class train compartment so it matches the class of our characters.   The lead character of Some Do Not (and I think the work as a whole) is Christopher Tietjens.   He comes from a wealthy family (how wealthy is up for debate as book one closes), he is quite brilliant.   He works as a statistician for the British government.   He is so well read and cultured that as a hobby he is doing a report on errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica .   Physically he is quite large and out of shape.   He is married to Sylvia Tietjens.     I have quoted previously her description.    She is the very epitome of an upper class beauty.   She seems to require a lot of stimulation and is easily bored indicating perhaps a lack of internal resources.   She does not admire Tietjens as much as I do.   Maybe she knows something or maybe Tietjens is a bit of a bluff.   She sees him as terrible "know it all" and openly mocks him with her adultery which may have produced a child born in wedlock but whose father is not her husband.     We also meet a seemingly good friend of Tietjens', MacMaster.    In the relationships of the characters there do not seem to be too many relationships of equality as befitting this very class conscious work.   

In writing about the work I am tempted to simply do a lot of quotes and say the whole 800 pages is full of one marvelous turn of phrase or epigram of wonder after another.   Tietjens does like to make "pronouncements" on all sorts of topics.   Some of what he says is for sure wrong.   He attributes to an unspecified Russian writer a quote from a short story by Henry James.   There are constant cultural references in the work.   I had to think that maybe some of them are wrong also but the Henry James error is the one I could catch where as the references to Rossetti are not something I can judge.   

Here are what I think are some of the themes of  Parade's End as shown in Some Do Not:   marriage, class structure, the nature of art and literature (Tietjens has some very interesting off the wall things to say about literature), the construction of history (history does not just happen it is a novel), the use of conversation to create bonds and to keep yourself isolated.    As the work proceeds we will, I think, see much of the world of the gentry depicted in Some Do Not destroyed by events beyond their control.    We will also see these same people win a war and we may learn in part why.   Events are not always, for me at least, easy to follow in the narrative and that is for sure on purpose I think.   ( I was I confess confused a bit by the bank overdraft that comes into play toward the end of Some Do Not).    I am very much looking forward to seeing how The Great War will affect the people in Some Do Not.   How will the marriage of the Tietjens hold up?   Will we learn a lot about life in France during the war.   There are period drama type plot threads between the characters.   Not only are the perceptions of the characters not fully reliable, I think the narration of the story is itself subject to differing understandings.   

Dwight of A Common Reader has done  a wonderful job in sorting out the action and themes of Some Do Not-

Parade's End is a pure delight just for the turns of phrases and the conversations alone.   The references to art and literature are wonderful.   I am taking the trouble to track down the references I do not fully follow (imagine how hard this was to do in pre-internet days!) and am finding it very edifying.   

 Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa have have some close thematic and narrative similarities to those shown by FMF.    I might go more into this latter as I read an additional work by Akutagawa to explain   the very similar way both writers use artifacts to create class divides.   

I will start part two, No More Parades today.  I am very excited to see what will happen next.   I will probably do a couple of  reading note posts on it as I proceed through the work then attempt a closing post on it.   

Reading Notes on Parade's End

Parade's End -is it an Encyclopedic Narrative?-a question for readers

 Is Parade's End an Encyclopedic Narrative? -a question for readers-

Conspiracy of Commodities: Postmodern Encyclopedic Narrative and Crowdedness Alan Clinton

[1] In 1976, Edward Mendelson used the novel Gravity's Rainbow in order to introduce a genre that had "never previously been identified"(161), the "encyclopedic narrative." A cynical reading of his essay (published in a volume on Thomas Pynchon entitled Mindful Pleasures)  would view the new genre as Mendelson's excuse to glorify his favorite novelist, for his definition of "encyclopedic authors" is extremely exclusive: Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, and of course, Pynchon. Yet, Mendelson does provide a set of criteria for encyclopedic narratives which extends beyond their exceptional authors: 1) they all include an extensive account of at least one technology or science; 2) they are an encyclodedia of literary styles; 3) they all provide a history of language (are metalinguistic); 4) they all propose a theory of social organization.  From  

In a very famous and still highly regarded early essay on Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Professor Edward Mendelson (Columbia University) coined the term "Encyclopedic Narrative" as given an informative name to what he said were seven master literary works of western civilization.   (listed in the quote above)-All these works sort of sum up a culture at its apex.    I know this concept is very useful in unraveling the mysteries of Gravity's Rainbow.   One of the incidental characteristics of an encyclopedic narrative is simply that it is a long book.   I began to wonder if maybe Mendleson had overlooked a very obvious encyclopedic narrative.   Most of the narratives are also about a culture in decline or at its apex.    Parade's End does use a variety of literary styles (not as wide a variety as Gravity's Rainbow maybe but as wide a variety as would be credible in the structure of the work).   It also makes reference to ancient literature and makes wide use of slang of an era just like Moby Dick uses whaling slang.    The extensive literary references can maybe be seen as part of a metalinguistic theory.   The lead character is both a man of extensive literary culture (some of which he has wrong-this is no accident of course) and a skilled statistician and versed in higher mathematics.   Parade's End does show us Tietjens explaining these functions in his various conversations.   There are a lot of obscure references in Parade's End just like in Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick.   Also do not forget one of the hobbies of our lead character is correcting the Encyclopedia Britannica.   There are extensive comments about the structure and nature of society in Parade's End also.   Parade's End is for sure a book about social structure and class construction through artifacts and literature.  

My question to readers of Parade's End is then should the work be treated as an encyclopedic narrative of  England in the 1910s?    Parade's End seems to be many things.   One of its  deeper themes seems to me to be the nature of culture and deeper still the nature of knowledge.     

Parade's End is also fun.   The conversations are marvelous and the relationships of the characters are really interesting.  Even the 3rd party style narrator is really a character in the story.   I will say it is not a work that you should lollipop your way through.    As you can see I am quite baldheaded over it and do run to the magpie on its marvels.  (ok no more slang from the 1910s!)

Reading Notes for Parade's End

Parade's End Read Along some notes and observations on chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7

Parade's End read along notes inspired by chapters four through seven of Some Do Not (part one of the tetralogy)


Cultural Creation in Parade's End

Normally when I read a novel and I do not feel I fully understand the cultural references or some of the words used I simply go past it hoping I will figure it out latter and not wanting to stop my reading to look things up I do not worry too much about what I do not understand.   In reading the first 140 pages of Some Do Not, the first novel in the tetralogy that makes up Parade's End,  I think you cannot really do that as I think one of the very basic themes of the work is the construction of culture and identity through things understood the right way.   Parade's End is in part about effects of knowledge and the lack of it and the faking of it.    In the opening chapters you cannot, I think, but help be impressed and intimidated a bit by the depth and width of the apparent culture of our central character Christopher Tietjens.   After all, he corrects  the Encyclopedia Britannica for fun.    Another way culture is created, and I think this is also a theme of Parade's End, is through slang.   Slang also defines class structures, it includes and excludes.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford-Chapter Two and Three in Which we meet Sylvia Tietjens

     Parade's End Read Along-Chapter 2 and 3-do we like or hate Sylvia Tietjens, wife of Christopher Tietjens

2nd entry in my Parade's End reading notes

In writing reading notes on a work like Parade's End before you have completed the novel you run the risk of not fully understanding events, characters and themes that are fully illuminated only with the further unfolding of the story.   If one had done posts as you read The Good Soldier you would see your first perceptions of things were not quite right.   You learn as you go on that things are far from simple.   Ford Madox Ford (FMF) is as subtle  and one must say as slippery a literary artist as anyone.    In doing reading notes on one of his works without first finishing it I think I will for sure end up learning from my mistakes.   

In Chapter One we met Christopher Tietjens.   He comes from a very well off family and works a statistician for the government.    He is a man of great culture and wide knowledge as evidenced by his hobby of correcting errors in The Encyclopedia Britannica (in the time of the opening of the book-early 1910s-in England-I think the Encyclopedia Britannica was the ultimate authority.   It was also quite expensive so the possession of it is another of the many many class indicators in Parade's End).    Tietjens is traveling on a train with his good friend Macmaster (from Scotland )    The friendship of Tietjens and Macmaster is not a relationship of equals and Macmaster defers to Tietjens as a superior man.   We do not yet know how important Macmaster will be in the story and if his deference to Tietjens is justified but it is there for sure as we start our story.

In Chapter Two we meet Sylvia Tietjens, the wife of Tietjens.   It is from her we learn that his  first name is Christopher and  his nickname is "Chrissie".    There are no accidents I can already see in the work of FMF.   Why "Christopher"?    Is it as obvious as an equation of Tietjens to Jesus or Columbus?   In the 21th century, "Chrissie" is a nickname appropriate for a woman, not a man.    I do not know if the same was true in 1912 so I cannot tell if this is to indicate the wife is mocking him for a lack of masculinity.   We learn first about Sylvia through the conversations of Mrs Satterwaite  (I loved the description of her) and a priest concerning her.  They are talking about Sylvia's attitude toward her husband:

"There are times when a woman hates a man-as Sylvia hates her husband..I tell you I have walked behind a man's back and nearly screamed because of my desire to put my nails into the veins of  his neck.  It was a fascination.   And it is worse with Sylvia.   It's a natural antipathy."

I left chapter one being in awe of the brilliance and cultural depth of Tietjens but wait, his wife seems to see him as a near idiot and an insufferable know it all and bore.   She seems to say she stays married to him only so she can torture him.   She has had numerous affairs, it seems, and seemingly  Tietjens does not have any clue he is not the father of his wife's child.   Here is a  description of Sylvia (we do not yet know how much we can rely on the narrator even though it is told in the 3rd person):

Immensely tall, slight, and slow in her movements, Sylvia Tietjens wore her reddish very fair hair in great bandeaux down over her ears.   Her oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a decade before that time.   

 We are still left a bit to ourselves to figure out from this description what Sylvia looked like.   We know she had red hair for sure.   "Immensely tall"?   well a six foot five woman is immensely tall.   We can guess she was not that tall so we really do not know what this means-does it just mean two or three inches taller than average?  then why call her immense.   I confess I had to look up the meaning of "bandeaux"  and this image appears to be it.   (My knowledge of expressions for fashion accessories of the 1910 is not great.)    I guess we are to assume that either the narrator was familiar enough with fashionable courtesans of ten years prior to the start of the story that he would at once compare Sylvia's expression to theirs or that is the in fact logical way to describe her..   Of course this begs the question as to whether this is an accurate picture of French courtesans or the projection on Sylvia of the sort of images the narrator can relate to.

Here is Sylvia's description of her husband:

I call my husband the Ox.   He is repulsive, like a swollen animal.

Sylvia's mother loves Christopher, she calls him one of her "best boys"  while Sylvia tells us her husband cannot bear her.   We know already our perceptions of these people and relationships are on shifting sand.

One of the pleasure of this work is the many epigram like remarks and sentences that I already have found in abundance in the first 3 chapters.   Here is one from Sylvia  "To know everything about a person is to be bored...bored....bored".   We know already Sylvia is talking for effect, in part.

The chapters two and three have interesting conversations about the nature of marriage, about religion, and relationships and sexual morality.   I was about ready to decide ok Sylvia is a bad person married to a wonderful man until we meet "The General"  in Chapter III who seems not a fool and he goes on an on about how wonderful Sylvia is.


I see Parade's End as totally worth reading for the many marvelous turns of phrase in the book alone and there is so much more in it.   I am really looking forward to going on in this book.    I may write a good number of these reading notes type of posts and then as I finish each section of the tetralogy  I will probably do a sort of summing post or two and then on finishing the work  I will probably do two or three over all posts on the work as a whole.     Because I do not know what is coming next some of  what I say will be in error as i go along but the errors are part of my reading experience.     I may end up doing 20 or more posts as I go along.  (I keep telling myself to make shorter posts on the books I read!)    To those  the read along I will link your posts in here and comment on them if I am able.    


To readers of my blog, I read normally several things at one time and will be posting next on a great super fun  Japanese novel.   I will say the Junichiro Tanizaki is the Japanese novelist that FMF seems most like to me, so far.   

There is a very telling post on Bibliographing that echos my remarks about the wonderful phrases that about so far in Parade's End.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford-some of the great things in Chapter One

The Read Along of Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford (a work in four parts-1924 to 1928-836 pages in the Penguin Books edition) is set to begin April 1.   Several people will be joining in so it should be very interesting-There are no rigid schedules the only request is you link your posts to here and that hopefully we can all comment on each others posts.    I invite any and all to join in.

A  Common Reader has just done a great post concerning on line resources on Ford Madox Ford and Parade's End

I want to just talk a bit about some of the wonders of Chapter 1.  (I will refer to chapters in making references as there are different editions.)   One of the great things I can already see in Parade's End are the marvelous observations about literature, history and current events by the central characters.   I enjoy a novel when the lead characters make me think.   A great novel can, through these remarks, reshape our own perceptions.   Here is a very interesting remark by the lead character of Parade's End, Tietjens:

"I don't read novels."  Tietjens answered.  "I know what is in em.   There has been nothing worth reading written in England since the eighteenth century expect by a woman...but it is natural for you enamel splashers to want to see them selves in bright and variegated literature.  Why shouldn't they?   It a healthy human desire and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied.

Maybe we do not agree with his remark about English novels but this for sure made me think.   Not just think about if this remark was correct but more about the mind set that would produce it.   Why dismiss all the canon status English male novelists of the 19th century (in an era when political correctness meant something far different than it does now).?

Parade's End  begins shortly before WWI (1914 to 1918)  on a train in England.   The conversations wanders to a consideration on the question as to why a great war is certain to happen.   Here is Tietjens explanation as to why war is sure to occur:

Yes war is inevitable.   Firstly, there is you fellows who cannot be trusted.  Then there is the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel.   Millions of them all over the world.  Not merely here.   And there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go around

 These few lines go a long way to explain the turmoil of the 20th century.   Here in Asia it can be seen stating the cause of the rise of communism in China with millions of deaths and the reign of Pot Pal in Cambodia,  leaving Europe aside.

This is my first reading of Parade's End and I have read only the first chapter so far but I think I can say we will be treated to 100s of such observations.   Maybe you think they are crazy (at least we now know what an enamel splasher is) but they will make us think and smile as well.  

As Tietjens and his companion Manchester begin to descend from the train here is what they see:

On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, were drifting toward the branch train bound for Rye, under the shepherding of erect, burdened footmen.

Ford Madox Ford (FMF from now on) knows how to paint a scene and evoke and era in a few lines.   There  are other things in Chapter one of Parade's End .   There are quotations from wonderful poems spoke by Manchester, passing references to things that allude to events in English history, narrative remarks about  Italian painters such as Botticelli and Rosetti,  and numerous  references to English places.   Chapter One is really nearly an introduction to the gentry in England if one works through the allusions.   The characters are "snobbish" and they do evaluate people based on their clothes, the circumstances of their birth etc.   But remember before we judge them,  some of the lead characters are headed into the abyss of the trenches of WWI.   Tietjens, who we will get to know very well, I think, knows he is a snob and is rather proud of what that means:

All the same, when the war comes it will be those little snobs who will save England, because they've the courage to know what they want and to say so.

I think I will do another post on place name references and cultural asides in Chapter One.   I think FMF in Parade's End has produced a kind of encyclopedic narrative and I want to ponder  a bit how this works using the references we see already in great profusion in Chapter One.  

I found Chapter One a great pleasure to read.   It made be think.   I marveled at the glorious prose.   I dreamed I was riding on a train.   I imagined a day where people were as educated as Tietjen and Manchester obviously are.    I do see the book as possibly itself seeming somehow "snobbish"  and overbearing in its presumption of cultural depth on the part of the reader to some readers.   I actually think I will quite enjoy this aspect of the book and I expect to learn a great deal from it.   I am going to read this book slower than I normally do and will go into greater depth than I ever have before in talking of other books.  To a large extent I am doing this as the writing of the posts will help clarify for me my understanding of the book.    I will also, I think, talk some about the themes of the book but I may focus on the workings of the narrative a bit.   To participants in the read along,  please let me know when you have done a post and I will link it.  

To readers of my blog,   I will, I hope be posting on a number of interesting books at the same time I am posting on Parade's End.   I hope others will join in and I can see just in chapter one the great conversations alone will make the book a wonder to read.   I will only post on Chapter One until the read along officially begins on April 1, 2010.