Agathos, the Rocky Island, and Other Sunday Stories and Parables-Samuel Wilberforce

This is the last novel in Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End" tetralogy. Its predecessors "Some Do Not", "No More Parades" and "A Man Could Stand Up" are all available on Librivox. In this coda to the tetralogy, the prevailing mood is elegiac. The foreground action takes place on a single day, some years after the Great War has ended, in the rural setting where Christopher Tietjens and his unmarried partner Valentine Wannop have settled down, and where Christopher's older brother lies unmoving under a thatched shelter, having long since suffered a stroke. Valentine is expecting a child, but Christopher's passionately irascible wife Sylvia has plans for upsetting this rural idyl. As always with Ford's mature work, the reader has to do some work to figure out "what is going on" as the tale jumps about in time and between points view, but Ford's display of narrative virtuosity is interlaced throughout with wry humour, and the novel's conclusion is heart-wrenchingly poignant. (Summary by Peter Dann)