Parade's End's End

[millionreasons]

I enjoyed Parade's End, although probably more for the casting than the story (was there a story? "Old-fashioned man feels out of step with the times" is more of a trope than a story) and I don't think I really knew what was going on, perhaps because I spent the first episode trying to work out who was whom and what they used to be in (her from Shameless, him from This is England, Queenie from Blackadder, Rupert Everett sporting a trim but unflattering beard) - I spent three episodes thinking that Sylvia was played by Anna Maxwell Martin as they have the same kind of jaw and Anna MM is often cast in period dramas (indeed, when arguing about whether the Tietjens were county or not (the county in question being Yorkshire), Rupey said: "We're South Riding by a whisker". Since i) South Riding has never existed, and ii) Anna M played the lead role in the adaptation of Winifred Holtby's municipal drama, I thought Tom Stoppard was making a meta-reference. Sometimes, I over-think things). It also seemed that they were hoping that people like me, who have poor facial recognition, would think that Valentine was played by Carey Mulligan. Benny Cum* was of course, marvellous, although I think by lowering his voice an octave, he may have been attempting the gravitas of Michael Gambon, but he ended up sounding like a cross between Bane and Batman.

I wonder if the BBC ought to have waited until 2014 to show this; it would have fitted in with the centenary of World War 1, which, as I have written before, will no doubt be re-branded as Brave Young Men Sacrificing For Their Country rather than Propagandised Pointless Slaughter.

I haven't read the books (although I do have The Good Soldier on my to-read list) so am unsure as to what liberties were taken in the adaptation of it. Julian Barnes in the Guardian wrote that the marriage of Sylvia and Christopher is a sado-masochistic one with her needling and torturing him (not in a 50 Shades of Grey way), but I didn't get that from the TV adaptation at all. I suppose to readers in the twenties, Sylvia's sexual mores would have been her fatal flaw, but to the modern viewer it's her endless bloody whining and what I saw was a promiscuous, flighty woman "tamed" by her honourable husband (c.f. The Big Sleep). Tietjens's refusal to fall for Sylvia's games is what made her love him, she saw him as stronger than herself. Another traditional trope. Since Tietjens was also loved by the chaste and committed Valentine, he had both "the virgin" and "the whore" (see above re: tropes).

* Try as I might, my attempts to get this soubriquet adopted as his official nickname have failed pathetically.