March’s Reading group: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Hemingway said he smelled, Pound called him a liar, and some say he was antisemitic – but he was also a prose genius, and this month’s choice is a modernist classic

This March one of the finest – and possibly strangest – books in the English language is 100 years old: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. And the first thing to note about this constantly wrongfooting book is that the publication date and the title are not as significant as you may think. This is not a first world war book – unless you count its crushing despondency and bitterness as part and parcel of the malaise that brought about the great conflagration.

The Good Soldier is a book about marriage – and not in a good way. The title is ironic. Both because quite quickly after you start reading you’ll be questioning how virtuous its one soldier is – and in the looser, Alanis Morrissette sense of the word, if you believe Ford Madox Ford:

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