The 100 best novels: No 41 - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)

Ford's masterpiece is a searing study of moral dissolution behind the facade of an English gentleman and its stylistic influence lingers to this day



Robert McCrum introduces the series

The Good Soldier was conceived by Ford Madox Ford as the summation of his career as an admired and influential Edwardian novelist, his "last book", and a middle-aged writer's traditional riposte to the literary Cubists, Vorticists and Imagists of the day. In fact, it far outlives those heady innovators and stands at the entrance to 20th-century fiction as a dark, spellbinding puzzle, a novel of perennially enthralling and mysterious depths whose influence lingers like gun-smoke after a shooting.

The "good soldier" of the title is the retired Indian army veteran Captain Edward Ashburnham, who, with his wife Leonora, forms an apparently normal friendship with two Americans, John and Florence Dowell, at the German spa town of Nauheim, where, in August 1913, all four have gone for a cure.

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