Oh those Brits: Parade's End

Edwardian fiction now has it's own display section in my town library, thanks to the BBC and PBS, but who's complaining? There are some great novels from the period, some I've read, many I haven't, so let's get started. Inspired also by TV - HBO in this case - I started Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End last night and yes, I know it's not exactly Edwardian (written from I think about 1929-31?) but its setting, mood, tempo, and style make it, let's say, retro-Edwardian. I know FMF primarily from The Good Soldier, a terrific novel, and for being the dedicatee of several (?) Conrad novels. I didn't know till yesterday that Parade's End is actually a quartet - was a little daunted by teh 800+ page Everyman edition, but knowing its a series of novels I may read them over an extended time, as I've done with Powell's Dance to the Music of Time and as I did (going on 2nd round) with Proust. OK, so the first 30 pp or so?: you know you're in a Georgian/Edwardian novel when you don't know where you are - at least if you're an American reader. Typical of the time, FMF just throws us into a railroad carriage with two guys, gives us a pretty good description of the two, Macmaster and some other unusual name, Treitling?, opposites in look and temperament, Macmaster well groomed and a bit uptight and T. kind of frumpy and a memory savant. They're off on some kind of British official inspection - who can keep this stuff straight, esp with all the references to class, schools, clubs, etc. - it's as full of social clues, more, than a Tom Wolfe novel, and these clues certainly fade over time. So forget about that - let's just figure out what's happening. T's wife has left him - this is kind of scandalous, and he declines to make the scandal worse by divorcing - he's been rooming with Macmaster in her absence, and now he's got word that she wants to reconcile, and he must decide: take her back into his life? (There's also a child, so you'd think the decision would be obvious, but still - this is British fiction, so maybe it would be obvious if they shared a dog.) Then we jump over to a German (?) spa, and we see his wife, and begin to get her point of view - that's about as far as I've gotten. Parade's End is surprisingly frank and open about sexuality, for its day - and I was surprised, so far, at how much of it is or will be a love story - I pictured from the title more of a war story. But I should have thought back to The Good Soldier, which is not a war story at all but a novel about passion gone wrong. FMF is sly and deceptive.