Parade's End and Modern(ist) fiction

Tietjens on the eve of his return to the front in WWI, in a weird spat with his wife, Sylvia, who gives him permission to spend his last night in England with the suffragette Violet (?) Wannop (!), on whom he has an (unrequited?) crush - but her offer leads to an outburst from Tietjens, since when is he so moral or loyal? - and further strange behavior, as he is still clearly suffering from shell shock or other war trauma and is in no way fit to return to the front. Their dispute interrupted by arrival of a man (not from Porlock) with another really strange name that I can't remember right now, Port Collis - ha! - or something like that, who wants T. to sign some sort of agreement - a will or legal document, but he immediately realizes the gravity of T's condition. Again, Ford Madox Ford is writing a truly unconventional war novel, not only war as seen from the stateside but war as not seen at all except through its after-effects (at least so far). A smart anonymous commentator on yesterday's post notes that the entire Parade's End concerns only a few days of action, all the rest seen in flashback, and the post encourages me to stay with the series, even though the first volume, Some Do Not..., is daunting. I will - there's enough promise and enough to hold my interest. I'm not surprised, however, that Parade's End is less often read than The Good Soldier or other Edwardian-Georgian fiction now so in vogue thanks to the BBC - yes it is modernist, in regard to plot construction (cubist?) and narrative focus, shifting radically and suddenly from interior focus (we are at times entirely in T's head) to non-omnisicient narration: in much of the volume we see events unfold before us as a "fly on the wall" might, if the fly were Virginia Woolf - very little context, no back story, we have to figure out the meaning, and often the setting or even the speaker, by the clues dropped before us like breadcrumbs. Challenging - but great Modern fiction is recognized by the complete work, when all coheres, not by incidental passages.