Many of you may already have watched the first episode of Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Parade's End, aired last night on BBC Two.

I'll be turning to the iPlayer this weekend to find out how Stoppard has managed to turn Ford Madox Ford's brilliant quartet of novels into a five-part series. While there's been a bit of sparring between fans of the new drama and that of its Edwardian cousin Downton Abbey, the comparisons are pointless. "Downton for grown-ups" is the put-down from those thrilled at the graphic sex scenes in Stoppard's version, which make Julian Fellowes's tale look as spicey as rice pudding. Why one has to be disparaged to make the other appear better, though, makes no sense. Even Parade's End's director, Susanna White joined in, saying idiotically, "I like to think of Parade's End as Downton Abbey meets The Wire." Couldn't she just think about it as one of the most memorable and bleak literary works of the 20th century?

And yet, for all the crass chatter, the augurs for this series are hopeful. Admittedly one critic complained about the disjointed flashbacks, but they are entirely in keeping with Ford's fractured style in which his confusing time-leaps and random interior reflections are intended to represent the breakdown of English society, and of the hero's personality, in the face of the Great War and its miserable aftermath. This reviewer also bemoaned the hero Tietjens's coldness, as acted by Benedict Cumberbatch, yet this is precisely as he was written.

When Ford introduces this large, untidy son of a Yorkshire gentleman, he informs us that "the basis of Christopher Tietjens's emotional existence was a complete taciturnity – at any rate as to his emotions". When his wife leaves him for another man, he utters no more than 20 words on the subject, almost all of them squeezed out of him, like pips from a squashed tomato, by his father. And when she asks to be taken back, he says even less.

Ford's intention was to write a novel about profoundly affecting subjects "without passion". These included not only the horror of war but the dying throes of an ancient English way of life, and of the moral values that once shaped the way people behaved. The result is a chillingly evocative work that lies somewhere in style and mood between Henry James and Evelyn Waugh, without quite reaching the sophistication and tonal perfection of either.

It's been estimated that there have been 700 or so novels about the First World War, but for the late Malcolm Bradbury, Parade's End is "undoubtedly the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War". In his introduction to the Everyman edition of Parade's End (£12.99, hardback – the only edition you'll ever need and likely the most attractive), Bradbury also cites admirers such as Graham Greene and WH Auden, who recognised the subtlety and depth of Ford's work.

Covering the period 1912 to the 1920s, Parade's End drew on Ford's traumatic experience behind the frontlines, as well as on his turbulent private life. One reason suggested for him changing his name from Ford Hermann Hueffer was the desire to distance himself from a tiresome wife and cloying mistress. Yet despite the women who fell in and out of his ramshackle bed, he was not by all accounts the most alluring of men. Rebecca West described an embrace from him as making her feel like "the toast under a poached egg".

Ford wrote more than 80 books, but only one matched Parade's End. Those who quail at the thought of the quartet should read instead his slim masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Written on the eve of the First World War it is a private tragedy of emotional betrayal that represents the loss of innocence and identity of a generation and a class about to face the trenches. It begins with one of the most famous sentences in literature: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." And in many ways, like Parade's End, it is.