Krishna
There is not much to give by way of preamble so let’s jump right down to the story. This was written in 1924 but I have not heard of Ford Maddox Ford the same way I know of Dickens or others.
Two men are going in a luxurious train. Tietjens and McMaster, two polar opposites. McMaster fancies himself as a writer and is orderly. Tietjens is a happy go lucky fellow. They are from the University. Tietjens is of aristocratic lineage and everything came to him easily. But they are good friends. Tietjen’s father helped McMaster get a job.
Tietjen marries, moved to another house (while McMaster continues to stay in the original Tietjen house) and his wife runs away with a lover, leaving him stranded with two kids and then after many weeks, the wife coolly writes and asks him to take her back.
Some British aristocratic blather follows. How McMaster hopes to escape into the nobility through the sheer power of writing by getting books published and stuff like that.
Then they get into morality and religion argument that is fairly boring and seems to be frankly routine in many of the really old stories.
Sylvia is a colourless woman who just ‘is bored’ about everything and annoys the hell out of you whenever she appears on the pages of this book.
Then even the conversations become annoying. They talk about stupid stuff that has no relevance to the story at all.
All of them behave counter intuitively, annoying a reader like me. Tetjian hates golf but still plays anyway, for instance.
He meets and lets a tomboyish girl escape. They are fighting for women’s right to vote.
The dialogs suck. An example : “Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats, this is the entire humanity”. You may think this is out of context but the book throws them at you without any context either. So droll, all of it.
It is painful to read. One vile man seems to behave totally weird and McMaster “knows” how to handle him. (Punch him in the groin is his solution.) Tetjian falls in love with a Miss Winstrop. Her mother seems to be a great bore (to us readers, not intended by the author to be such).
He is a man of many talents, this Tietjens but seems very boring. While playing golf he is bored with the game but amuses himself by mathematically calculating the trajectory of the hit ball. Come on….
Even the twists are oh so boring. It is as Homer Simpson famously said about the Disney Park Epcot Centre “Aaah! Even flying over it is so boring!”
They finally realize that Tetjian is a saint and a man with almost infinite talents. Yawn…
But one interesting thing stands out – you learn that the proverb about ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven’ comes from the difficulty camels had of passing through a gate in Jerusalem called ‘The Eye of the Needle’. True? I don’t know, but if so, this is very interesting!
More blather about who should have an affair with whom and why they don’t. Final blather about how everyone is jealous of Tetjian.
The ending is equally lame. Since this is no great twist, I would like to let you know that the title stands for ‘(Outside of marriage) Some Do Fornicate and Some Do Not Fornicate’. Big whoop.
It is not totally boring and so let us say a 3/10
– Krishna (May 2018)