The beginning of the modern age: Parade's End

The HBO 5-part mini-series Parade's End is excellent all the way through - the first three parts mostly covering volume 1 of the Ford Madox Ford quartet, as the characters engage in various domestic disputes and as the threat of war looms, and the last two parts cover, I believe, material in the final 3 volumes - in any case, what we see in the last two parts of the miniseries is Tietjens returning to the front lines, after his brief return to England to recover from shell shock, and in effect finding himself through his service as a soldier - and knowing that when he returns to London (in part 5) that he can never return to his horrible marriage to Sylvia (the excellent Rebecca Hall) but must break convention and live with his mistress - it seems their passion has been chaste and from afar - the much younger Valentine Wannop. Essentially, what Ford, and this series - with a really smart and taut script by Tom Stoppard and crisp direction by Susanna White - don't know anything about her) - are able to do is show the growth and development of the main character, moving from a self-righteous somewhat foppish, idealistic young English government official to a worldly, somewhat cynical and mistrustful, far more modern - i.e., breaking free to a degree from the class structure and conventions - adult - and this as a metaphor for the growth and changes of the psyche and social structure of the entire nation, after enduring the fear and misery of the war and rising triumphant. There's still class structure of course - but the closing scenes, of Tietjens finding comfort and well-being not in his huge estate or with his snobbish wife but with the leftist Valentine and with his army buddies in his barely furnished flat - is a hopeful metaphor or analogue to the changes that would slowly transform the culture over the course of the century. In other words, it's about the opening of the modern age - as seen through sexuality, politics, and social class. The production values, as noted in earlier post, are what we have come to expect from BBC shows - but the last two parts are especially strong in depiction of trench warfare, with explosives all around and bullets whizzing and the colonel in charge gone completely insane. The series, great as it is, should not replace reading the novels - I will go back to them - but it's something like a primer to help readers follow the very complex web that Ford wove: his novels are part of the modern-fiction era, something like Woolf (though less interior, more political) and difficult at first go - the fiction itself is an example in style of the movement the novels are meant to depict - moving away from convention and toward a new, more open and free and challenging form of literary (and socio-political) expression.