No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction

by Ford Madox Ford, Paul Skinner (Editor)

No Enemy, written between The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade's End (1919) was not published until 1929 in New York. It is vintage Ford, neglected in part because of its publishing history, in part because it falls between the stools of fiction and autobiography.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, British Literature, World War I

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.

Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".

Reviews

[lucy snow · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think i've technically only read half of this but that is all that alex provides us with, and that is all that is relevant for my essay so here we go.

ford refracts himself once again, this time into two characters (the compiler and gringoire) in order to try and comprehend and explore his war experience. gringoire remembers only 4 (or 5 i can't remember lol (ironic)) significant landscapes that epitomise the war for him. very interesting and impressionist and fragmentary. very useful for essay, especially the last one.

gringoire stands on a hilltop looking down at german trenches (a scene that ford revises multiple times, in parade's end and in a preface to a book he was reviewing as well), seeing the tactical advantages of his position and revelling in the destruction. then, he is let off duty, and suddenly the view becomes once again just 'landscape' rather than strategic. very very cool. i will be writing about it potentially today. we will see how far we get through. done 800 words so far so maybe i could manage 2000 or something today.

good stuff!

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good novel, not Ford’s best, ending excellent, interesting passages on experience, preoccupation, & noticing.

[Mariam Odent · Rating 2 out of 5]

A nebulous mess of a book is what comes to mind when I think of this book. This isn't his best work and it's largely forgotten for good reason. It feels less like a novel than a series of stream of consciousness rants/impressions/thoughts. The narrator tells us of his visit to an eccentric WWI war veteran who cooks absurd meals. Sometimes we get events told from this unknown narrator and his general impressions of the veteran. There are sections where the war veteran takes over the narrative and we are subjected to a rant that goes on and on and its ideas and politics are obviously a product of its time and have little interest to me as a reader.

No Enemy has its interesting moments. There's a little vignette of the veteran's experience in a small French town during WWI that reminded me of some moments in Parade's End in its detail of the people, the soldiers and the savage unpredictability of random moments of violence when bombs drop. I didn't know what to think of the ending, which was rambling but beautifully poetic even if I didn't know what was going on.

It's probably only die-hard Ford fans who would bother with this. It's got moments of brilliance amidst all the waffling ramblings.

[Mary Slowik · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The last war was a food riot: the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination of the sons of men."

Curious, prophetic. This can make for difficult reading in that it's scatter-shot in places, consisting almost entirely of the reflections of a 'warrior-poet' coming back from the first World War, a character named Gringoire. It's described as a 'reconstructionary' novel, examining how a human being can be broken by war only to come back stronger. Oppressed by the madness of it all, maybe, but able to rip some beauty out of it too. This is an unfortunately forgotten book, which seems to prefigure many later anti-war satires like Catch-22. This doesn't quite have the humor of those, though, and it's possessed through and through by a Francophilic British mentality (plenty of untranslated French lines and passages). Despite all that, it's definitely worth reading.

Not to mention its chords of pessimism, the realistic notion that, if we occupy the entire world and keep breeding like maniacs, we can never expect a lasting peace. Of course, being humans, we'd find peace too boring anyway. Note to species: do not evolve from apes.