[McFee was an English writer best known for his tales of adventures at sea. In the following excerpt, he offers a mixed review of The Last Post.]

Readers will have this opinion and that about these novels by Mr. Ford. They will be enthusiastic, and they will remain mildly indifferent to a very highly-specialized glamour. But they will all fail to agree with the announcement on the jacket-flaps of The Last Post that the novels deal with the lives of a small group of representative individuals. That word "representative" needs some qualification. Those individuals may be described as interesting and convincing and so on, but with the possible exception of Mark Tietjens, they are not representative English people. They are representative of Tory England only in their intense individuality, in their ability to do odd and shocking things without turning a hair.

Mark Tietjens, brother of the unhappy Christopher, holds the center of the stage in The Last Post. We find him, on page one, stretched out on a pallet beneath a roof of thatch in a Sussex garden on a hill where he can see four counties falling away below him. That is all he can do now—see, hear and think. Near by Christopher is living with Valentine Wannop, who is going to have a baby. They are in the antique furniture business, Christopher sending his finds to a partner in New York. Mark is being cared for by his wife, Marie Leonie, nee Riotor, a big, blonde Norman woman with whom he lived for twenty years before he made her Lady Tietjens after the war.

It turns out, as one suspected while reading A Man Could Stand Up, that Mark Tietjens is a much more interesting man than Christopher. He is the real Tory. Christopher has the instincts of his class, but he is too self-conscious to be typical, or even quite credible, until he steps out of his class. Because a self-conscious Tory is almost a contradiction in terms. Christopher runs true to form, but Mark's form is much more true. He is the perfectly inarticulate Englishman, the man whose interests in life are limited to his horses, his women and his job. The trouble with such a character in an ordinary novel is that, as he never speaks in character, he cannot be exploited by the ordinary conventional machinery used in such a novel. He can only be caricatured. Dickens did this in Dombey and Son in the case of Mr. Toots, to whom everything in the world was "of no consequence." Mr. Toots was a genuine Tory of the old school. And so Mr. Ford really loses nothing by bringing on Mark Tietjens bedridden by a stroke that has robbed him of the powers of speech. A Yorkshire Tory never had any powers of speech. What we get in The Last Post, through Mr. Ford's fine art, is Mark's thoughts; his thought of Marie Léonie, of Sylvia and young Mark, son of Sylvia and Christopher, who comes from Cambridge full of acquired communistic ideas and ineradicable Tory instincts; of Valentine, and of the American woman, Mrs. Millicent de Bray Pape.

The action—if that is the Right word—covers a very brief period. That is the modern way of doing the novel. James Joyce took 400,000 words to deal with 24 hours in one man's life. Mr. Ford requires only 60,000 words for an afternoon. But once we are in the stream of consciousness time ceases to have much significance. This is the secret of Mr. Ford's art. He does not give us the almighty lift that came to us while reading No More Parades, but it is there. It may be—though this is not laid down as an iron law— that the composition of Sagas, like the reading of them, is a tiring business. They have to be very good, these later volumes, because they inevitably invite comparison with their forebears, from which they are biologically descended.

Does this last of the Tietjens books, the fourth of the series, come off? The answer is that, so far as technique is concerned, it comes off extraordinarily well. That it is practically flawless. The question immediately arises, however, whether a flawless technique is the whole story. There is a rage among the upper crust of readers for flawless technique, for great reservoirs of memories of past events out of which pour streams of consciousness. But when all is said and done it is only what is in the author's brain that can come out in his book. The chances are that he has to invent his psychology at times just as he has to contrive and shape his plot, if he deigns to have one. And certainly the more flawless his technique the more convincing he can make that psychology. But whether mankind in general will ever cotton to these intricate word-patterns is doubtful. They are becoming a shade too stenographic. The Last Post at times is terribly like a psychopathic ward in some fabulous hospital for world-war wreckage. One is desperately sorry for these people, even though they had a superb time of it in England for a hundred and fifty years. But one is glad at least to get out into the open air again.