Audiobook · read by volunteers
Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)
Read by Richard Grove, John W. Michaels, Floyd Wilde, Denise Lacey, Martina Hutchins, JimOCR, mailman61953 · 20 chapters · 7 h 39
About the book
Two couples, apparently perfect, meet every summer at a German spa for nine years. The Ashburnhams are an English officer and his wife, and the Dowells are wealthy Americans. To the world they are model friends, stable and respectable. But the narrator, John Dowell, now looks back on those years, and the picture begins to unravel.
Dowell tells the story in a roundabout way, circling back, correcting himself, and revealing facts out of order. Gradually the reader begins to realise that nothing was as it seemed, and that the narrator himself may not be entirely reliable. What emerges is a tale of passion, deceit and quiet tragedy.
Ford Madox Ford’s novel is a landmark of modern fiction, both subtle and moving. Twenty chapters, a little under eight hours. A challenging, rewarding listen for those who enjoy a puzzle of memory and perspective.
Introduction
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor, a central figure in the literary world of the early twentieth century. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad, founded the English Review, which published many of the leading writers of the day, and later edited the Transatlantic Review in Paris. His best-known work is the tetralogy Parade’s End, and above all The Good Soldier, published in 1915.
The novel is set just before the First World War and presents the lives of two seemingly perfect couples through the account of one of them. Its technique was highly innovative. The story is told through a series of flashbacks that do not follow chronological order, an approach Ford saw as a more faithful representation of how a person actually remembers and tells a story. The narrator’s limitations and hesitations are part of the design, and they invite the reader to read between the lines.
When it first appeared the book attracted modest attention, but its reputation grew over the years, and it is now often listed among the finest English novels of the twentieth century. It is admired for its precision, its irony and the emotional force that lies beneath its elegant surface.
This recording has twenty chapters and lasts almost eight hours, read by LibriVox volunteers. It is a novel that rewards attention and repeated listening, and its structure makes it particularly interesting to hear in sequence.
Public domain
Ford Madox Ford died in 1939: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text