[Pickrel is an American author, educator, and critic whose reviews have appeared in Commentary, the New York Herald Tribune, and Book Week. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Parade's End reflects Ford's belief that people will attempt to avoid loneliness and isolation at all costs.]

The chief character in Parade's End is Christopher Tietjens, the younger son of a great Yorkshire family, a man who calls himself "the last Tory," who regards himself as a survival of the eighteenth century: a gentleman, a scholar, and (with a landlord's respect for the Biggest Landlord of them all) a Christian. Married to a beautiful, depraved woman whose object in life is to make him miserable, he falls in love with a younger and plainer girl and eventually, after he has served his country well in the First World War, sets up housekeeping with her, in a very humble way.

Ford's admirers have made much of Christopher Tietjens as a man with a code in a codeless society, but in truth this is the least attractive aspect of the story. The code is a shabby one which (for example) demands that a man afford the protection of his great name and wealth to a worthless woman ("a gentleman never divorces") but permits him to expose a far finer woman to the calumny of living out of wedlock and her children to the reproaches of illegitimacy. Surely a man, gentleman or otherwise, can and sometimes should sacrifice himself to his ideal of honor, but just as surely he cannot sacrifice others, including those still unborn.

Indeed, as you read Parade's End you realize that Ford's respect for the code is to a considerable extent simply his taking sides with those who have had power against those who are going to have it. But Christopher Tietjens himself points out, "The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners." In other words, people who know how to behave are always being replaced by those who don't. That very eighteenth century which Tietjens admired so much saw some pretty considerable revolutions, and the seventeenth century (in which he would have liked to be a country parson like George Herbert) was not an entirely placid time, even for country parsons. No, this alignment with the social-class-that-was is the least attractive aspect of Ford's novel, and it accounts for most of its less pleasant characteristics, such as the smirking anti-Semitism and the sometimes tiresome display of upper-class information.

Happily, Ford's sense of the tragic went far beyond his anguish at a faulting in the social strata, and, as a result, his book is very much worth reading today. His subject—the subject of all that is finest in the novel—is the difficulty of "keeping in touch." This is the foundation of the book; it appears and reappears on the surface with almost endless variety. It unites in one sweeping metaphor the sections dealing with the war (surely some of the finest writing about war ever to appear in English) with the sections laid in peacetime.

"It was the dominant idea of Tietjens, perhaps the main idea he got out of warfare—that at all costs you must keep in touch with your neighboring troops." This is a narrow and practical statement of the great horror of trench warfare as Ford sees it: the feeling that one is being abandoned and betrayed—sometimes by one's superiors, sometimes by one's equals or inferiors, but always by those at home, those in charge. What should have been a mighty wave is just a collection of drops that will vanish into the unmarked sand. The feeling of separateness—from civilians, from home, from one's companions—increases until there remains only the single commandment: Thou shalt not go mad.

What is explicit in war is implicit in peacetime. The need to communicate with your neighbors is just as imperative and just as difficult to fulfill. When one man's appearance is the next man's reality, they cannot often be talking about the same thing. With marvelous—and perhaps excessive—dexterity, Ford surrounds Tietjens with layer after layer of misinterpretation, and on each layer one or another of the characters builds his life; and by an extraordinary command of the techniques of modern fiction, Ford makes the reader participate in the novel very much as the characters do, for the reader frequently builds on false premises and finds himself in the middle of a situation long before he understands it.

At the end, the whole story is gathered up in one daring symbol: Tietjens' brother Mark. As a Minister of Transport, Mark Tietjens has devoted his life to communication of a sort, but he has given up the whole effort. Ill and resolved to speak no more, "wanting to be out of a world that he found fusionless," withdrawn like a dumb god while the mortals who still hanker after communication parade past him as in a frieze, he at last makes a little sense of his life. In the end, the Word was not.

Paade's End is a book of great brilliance and very little charm. There are scenes—such as one at a breakfast party—as dazzling as anything in modern English fiction; but those winning aspects of the world which at the same time heighten the tragedy of man's aloneness and go far towards reconciling him to it find no place in the novel. There isn't, for instance, a single child or even a likable dog in the whole 836 pages. And as long as human beings want to like life, charm will outlast brilliance in fiction.