Downton for adults

For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to do for three reasons: it is the world of Downton but not Downton. It is not what we expect of war novels. And it was written by Ford Madox Ford.

Ford Madox who? is the response that anyone writing about Ford has come to expect. He’s often confused with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, his maternal grandfather, or even with Henry (no relation). Some have heard of his best-known novel, The Good Soldier; those that have read it tend never to forget it.

Ford, who died in 1939 and who wrote Parade’s End in the 1920s after wartime service as an over-age subaltern, has never been popular. But his work has attracted many modern writers — A.S. Byatt, Colm Tóibin, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess — and inspired many more loyal readers. He was highly influential during the first two decades of the 20th century, one of our most original and engaging writers and an associate or friend of Conrad, James, Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound and many others.

Tom Stoppard had not written for the BBC since 1979 when he was approached to script Parade’s End. He found a sprawling, non-linear novel in which much of the action takes place inside the head of the main character, Christopher Tietjens. What’s more, a novel that depicts war without fighting; love and passion without explicit scenes; and the fragmentation of social structure without social comment. Most challengingly of all, perhaps, the hero almost always rolls with the punches.