They say Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is a pioneering book with regard to the technique knows as the “unreliable narrator”: John Dowell begins by announcing he’s going to tell us the saddest story ever heard, and by the time he’s finished, you’ll at least be willing to grant it’s a contender.

A long time before that, however, you find yourself noticing how often he doubles back and switches focus in the story; how Dowell’s late wife and their (sort of, actually not really) friends Leonora and Edward Ashburnham become more monstrous and dysfunctional and deceiving of one other (and themselves) as his account progresses; how almost entirely absent Dowell is from most of the events that he reports to us, having himself supposedly heard about them from one of the others.

It’s rare that a book follows me around after I’ve finished it, but this one has been nagging at me for a couple of days now. I’m under no illusion that I could “solve” the mystery, decode the “true” events, even were I compelled to do so. In truth, I wonder whether Ford himself knew what had “really” happened; even if he did, I don’t think it matters.

While I’m too lazy to even consider it myself, I can kind of understand why people feel inspired to write lengthy, obsessive exegeses of, say, Gene Wolfe’s work: the mystery therein is meant to entice you in exactly that manner, and I further suspect that Wolfe was writing in search of his own answer, rather than assuming he could provide one to you. But there is a definite mystery there, nonetheless, and it’s a thing of cosmic scale; the inscrutability of Severian is not the mystery, but rather an expression or reflection thereof. The desire to “solve” Severian is the desire to solve the cosmic riddle of existence. (The hermetic trick of conflating them is both seed and flower of Wolfe’s work.)

In The Good Soldier, the mystery is simply Dowell, who is a cipher — to himself, I suspect, almost as much as to us as readers. Ford recognised this capacity for self-deception and the rewriting of past events in his own character, I feel certain, and he left plenty enough little hints and signposts to imply a number of possibilities as to what “really” happened — as to what Dowell did, in other words, between the things that may or may not have happened pretty much as he reports that they did.

But working out the true course of things is not the point. Dowell is a mystery, yes, but this is not a whodunnit, nor even a whydunnit; nor is it a cosmic mystery a la Wolfe. It is rather the mystery that we all represent to each other, and to ourselves: the mystery of motivation, of comprehension, of character, but perhaps most of all the mystery of how we ended up where we find ourselves, and how we’ll explain it to ourselves in hindsight.

It’s the most mundane mystery of them all, and one that will never be solved.