For the past few months, Benedict Cumberbatch has been my bedside companion – on the cover of the BBC Books edition of Parade’s End. It has taken me an age to finish this most exasperating, impenetrable tetralogy. Ford Madox Ford writes with no compassion for his reader: if you can’t keep up, too bad; if you never catch on, so what? The point is not to understand every conversation the characters have, but to understand the characters. You do not need to grasp every detail about the front line to realise what a bloody, chaotic mess it all was.

Parade’s End is an example of an author flouting all the rules and pulling it off. Every page is riddled with exclamation marks and ellipses, which good sense dictates should be reserved for special occasions. Yet it works. Madox Ford also manages to dispense with all the usual rules of narrative structure: something major happens and is then ignored for several chapters; revelations are dropped casually into conversation and you are left to leaf back through the book in confusion, wondering if you missed something vital earlier on. His style, though, helps make the book so psychologically astute. He puts you right in the heads of his characters, and what a fascinating bunch they are. Sylvia Tietjens must rank as one of fiction’s greatest anti-heroines, obsessed with inflicting cruelty on a husband that she simultaneously desires and detests, while the long-suffering Christopher Tietjens elicits sympathy, frustration and admiration in equal measure.

You might be wondering whether it’s worth the effort. It is. Parade’s End is one of those rare books that can be justly called a masterpiece.