No Enemy by Ford Madox Ford

The writer's friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of "Hansel and Gretel."

This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of men that went, and you hear of what they did when they went There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.

At first, when I read that last sentence, I imagined that Ford Madox Ford's war novel No Enemy would be about "reconstruction" in the sense of a man piecing his life back together after serving in World War I, reconstructing, that is, himself. And it is that, absolutely: the story of a man named Gringoire, who seems to be (?) an Englishman with a very French name, who came back from the war desiring only to keep a small home in the countryside, where he can tend to his garden, Candide-like, and make simple but delicious meals.

But it is a "reconstruction" too in the sense that an experience is "reconstructed" by memory, and throughout No Enemy, the narrator, calling himself "the Compiler," seeks to "reconstruct" Gringoire's memories of war, assembling them into a sensible whole. But Gringoire, a poet, tends to impressionism, and what the Compiler compiles seems less like a narrative than a collection of shifting images, which more often than not are entirely imagined by Gringoire. The "Four Landscapes" of the first section are sometimes real, for example, and sometimes not: chief among them is an image that Gringoire has during the war of a green "nook" in the countryside, a sanctuary away from the ravages of war. Gringoire steels himself to fight, it seems, by imagining that he is fighting for a sanctuary like this, and for every man's right to have one. The very landscape is at stake, not just the land over which the great armies move and fight, but the landscape that is imagined.

You can see in this, I think, echoes of Ford's other writings, where the experience of mind always supersedes the real or the physical. In The Good Soldier, John Dowling's impressions of comity and friendship overpower the truth (his wife and his best friend are having an affair), but perhaps it is these impressions that really matter (it was real music, Dowling says, rejecting the possibility that his experience has been a lie). In the Parade's End novels, which are also war novels, I'm reminded of Christopher Tietjens staring at a spot on the wall, which he relates with the scrupulous detail of a map of the Rhineland, or his brother Mark, who reports the entire final novel from a state of unspeaking paralysis.

No Enemy was written between The Good Soldier and Parade's End, as I understand it, which makes sense. The Good Soldier very pointedly ignores the war (Dowling calls his story "the saddest story ever told," ironically), and No Enemy reads like a man trying to put his impressions of the war into words for the first time. Mostly, these impressions fail to land. They're too ambiguous, too unrooted, and filtered twice over through Gringoire's memory and the Compiler's reporting. It's somehow both too specific to Ford's experience--how clear it is that Gringoire is semi-autobiographical, and the Compiler an attempt to give his own experience a measure of distance--and not specific enough. The war only comes alive, I think, in Parade's End, where Ford's imagination really starts to work.

I got bored by this book. For a war novel, the shelling and the artillery are always surprisingly muted, as if happening on the other side of the valley. Gringoire's little green nook might have been very real to him while he was sitting in the trenches, but it never really felt real to me. One thing that did interest me is this: Gringoire insists that "the next war" will be a war over food, predicting that European population growth would soon outstrip the ability of the land to sustain it. That didn't turn out to be true. But, given the current prognosis of climate change, it seems like Ford may be right after all--though a little delayed.