Parade's End Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William McFee

Critical Essay by William McFee

SOURCE: "Tietjens Once More," in New York Herald Tribune Books, January 15, 1928, p. 3.

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...
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