Fore!: Are there great golf novels?

I'm probably not reading Parade's End with the attention it deserves, but I have to say I'm having trouble figuring out who's who and what's going on: the two main guys, Tietjens and Macmaster, are or seem to be on some kind of British government inspection or assignment - they work in some division that supplies data and reports to Parliament (I think), and there was some dust-up about a higher authority asking them to fake some data or draw erroneous conclusions - all very murky and poorly delineated. Ford Madox Ford is, I guess, known for writing in an elliptical style: he just throws us in among these characters, with little intro or back story and no authorial omniscience or guidance, and it's very hard to pick up all the clues and inferences, especially for an American reader a century later - I don't know whether Tietjens is meant to be a conservative or a progressive, because the party and the topical references mean nothing to me. All that said - this is not meant to be a mysterious, Pynchon-like narrative - it's a pretty straightforward story of marital discontent, just told in disconcerting manner (like The Good Soldier, if memory serves): because though T and M seem to be on assignment, they're not working very hard and T is mostly thinking about potential reconciliation with estranged wife, as the two exchange a series of cryptic telegrams - the novel is building toward their meet-up, I think. But along the way ... they pause to play a round of golf. There's a foursome with 3 caddies (boys), because T. for unclear reasons refuses to have a caddy (stubborn? cheap? refusal to exploit labor? eccentric?) - and the round gets interrupted by some women on the course protesting about women's voting rights. Well this doesn't go down among the great golf novels - not that there are many; there's a cliched idea that the smaller the ball the better the writing, but I don't see a lot of evidence for that, at least in fiction. Updike used golf very well in the Rabbit novels, esp Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, if I remember correctly, but other than that? There's only one great golf novel I can think of, and it's not too well known: Toby Olsen's Sea View. I wonder if golf for FMF is a central theme in the series of novels that make up Parade's End, or just an interlude.