The slow, nasty dissolution of the relationships between a number of people - two noxious couples and a parade of extra-marital love interests - and it's a bit like watching a train crash in slow motion. Part of that sense of slow inevitability is down to the narrator. The story's told in first person by the least interesting member of the quartet, a stolidly wet individual of surpassing unawareness. At least, he's meant to be surpassingly unaware, although his (and by inference Ford's) understanding of character and motive is so precise that the total misunderstanding of his wife's character and actions - while the horrible woman is alive at any rate - makes him not quite consistent, I think. I was reminded a little of Somerset Maugham, who's one of the finest character writers I've read - although Maugham has an understanding of subtlety, I think, that Ford lacks, and certainly more capability for pace and tone. The Good Soldier is monumentally consistent, a sort of dull drone of quiet, repressed desperation, and while it's certainly compelling in its constant neurosis there's something still about it that's a little flat for me, like eating white bread alone for a week on end.