One quality of great literature: Characters who grow and "grow on you"

An amazing amount of time spent in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End explaining and unraveling the many complex relationships and affairs among the small group of characters, to the point where I'm saying : to what end? It's all kind of eerie - just about every one of the central characters hopelessly confused about their love life and sex life - generally hating their spouses, indifferent at best to their children, and in love with someone inaccessible - all totally mismatched and surreptitious and back-stabbing - and meanwhile there's a war going on - which they hardly seem to talk about - but it's as if the war makes every moment of domestic life more intense and in a way ephemeral, each character trying to extract as much experience from every moment because it may be his, or her, last. That said, it's an awfully meandering piece of writing. Evidence is that it has made a pretty good TV series, and I don't know if it's been adapted before; I will probably watch the HBO series at some point, and I suspect it may be better than the book, in eliciting the strands of plot from the complex weave of the novel - or at least it may be good in a different way. Nobody should read Parade's End for plot - you won't find it. But the characters, in their eccentricities and quirks, do grow, and grow on you, over the course of the narrative - one (though surely not the only) measure of great literature. By characters - I mostly mean the main character, Christopher Tietjens, a somewhat slovenly aesthete and savant/genius who gives up opportunity to continue serving the country in the Office of Statistics (he's a high ranking planner and advisor) to serve on the front, where he suffers shell shock - he's also very wealthy and indifferent to his wealth (and title), and in a horrible marriage with a beautiful but cruel wife (and with a child that neither cares for or about) and in an affair with at least one woman (Wannop) and maybe two, including the now wife of his best friend, Macmaster, whom he more or less supports in a lavish lifestyle (keeping up) through many loans. Yes, it's complicated, and that's only part of it. I can't and won't read my way through all four volumes unless more happens - so far, tons of talk - going forward, but it's an impressive piece of work never the less.