The Good Soldier was conceived by Ford Madox Ford as the summation of his career as an admired and influential Edwardian novelist, his "last book", and a middle-aged writer's traditional riposte to the literary Cubists, Vorticists and Imagists of the day. In fact, it far outlives those heady innovators and stands at the entrance to 20th-century fiction as a dark, spellbinding puzzle, a novel of perennially enthralling and mysterious depths whose influence lingers like gun-smoke after a shooting.
The "good soldier" of the title is the retired Indian army veteran Captain Edward Ashburnham, who, with his wife Leonora, forms an apparently normal friendship with two Americans, John and Florence Dowell, at the German spa town of Nauheim, where, in August 1913, all four have gone for a cure.
The apparent perfection of these two marriages quickly unravels. Dowell's steady unfolding of this "saddest story", in a series of flashbacks, exposes not only his wife's infidelity with "the good soldier" but also his own blind folly in not recognising the truth about his empty and loveless marriage.
The first part of Dowell's narration reaches its terrible climax with his wife Florence's suicide over her lover's betrayal. But here, where a more conventional novelist might have explored some of the nuances in the triangular relationship of the survivors – the Captain, Leonora and Dowell, their friend – Ford plunges into the terrible abyss of "the good soldier's" relations with his wife, his many affairs, and his shameful infatuation with his young ward, Nancy, a tormented affair that culminates in Ashburnham's suicide.