Time, History and the Wonders of Chance

Although I like to devote a post to each book I read, with the number of books that pass through my hands in a year, that just isn't possible at times.  When the burden gets a little too much then, I try to ease the pressure by doing a combined post, usually attempting to twist together two books, often chosen for that very purpose.  But what happens when it's time to write up two different, randomly-chosen books together?  Well, it's amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it...

*****
The Trumpet-Major, regarded as one of Thomas Hardy's minor works, is his only historical novel.  It is set during the Napoleonic wars, taking place in Overcombe, a village near the sea port of Budmouth (Weymouth!), on the south coast of Hardy's beloved Wessex.  Mrs. Garland and her daughter Anne, gentry fallen on hard times after the death of Mr. Garland, now rent rooms at the back of Mr. Loveday's mill.  The days pass quietly, if somewhat tediously, until the arrival one day of a large number of soldiers.

The military are encamped in Overcombe both to protect the coast against any possible invasion by the devil in French attire and to keep an eye on the King during his summer holidays.  However, the King is not the only visitor - when Miller Loveday's two sons, Robert and John, sailor and trumpet-major respectively, appear on the scene, Anne no longer has to complain of a boring life...

*****
...but a boring life is exactly what the characters in Jenny Erpenbeck's Heimsuchung (Visitation) would like.  The novel is set by a lake just outside Berlin and spans more than a century of local and national history, telling the story of a house and the various inhabitants it receives over the course of its existence.  The location is, of course, all important as its position in the heart of the former German Democratic Republic means that just when the house's owners feel settled and secure, a change in the political environment is just around the corner...

Heimsuchung is divided into two sets of alternating chapters: one concentrates on the various people who call the old summer house their own; the other focuses on the one character who stays put through all the upheavals, the taciturn, enigmatic Gardener.  By the end of the book, the reader is left wondering just who the house actually belongs to - that is if anyone really can own anything in the long run.

*****
At first glance, these two books may seem very different, impossible to twist together into a cohesive, integrated post.  In fact, the two books have an awful lot in common.  For one thing, both explore the lives of individuals against the backdrop of a greater historical setting.  The Trumpet-Major would be a straight tragi-comic romance were it not for the ever-present threat of a French invasion, a menace which subtly alters how the Lovedays and Garlands interact.  It is the possibility of losing one of her suitors on a European battlefield that pushes Anne Garland into casting her reserve aside - and it is a very real possibility.  One of the genuine historical events taking place during the novel is the battle of Trafalgar...

This sense of the historical intruding on the individual is also present in Heimsuchung.  Many of the people who come to acquire the house live there for decades and expect to live out their days sitting peacefully by the lake.  However, the rise of fascism, the coming of the Russians, the beginnings of a Communist state and legal battles of restitution all eventually conspire to drive the owners away.  While the house's location may be particularly unfortunate given the hindsight of twentieth-century history, it is a telling reminder that nothing lasts forever...

...which is another concept which links the two novels.  As well as the effect of the political and national on the local and individual, both stories also look at how individual lives contrast with time, on a far greater scale.  In Erpenbeck's book, there is a prologue which tells of the creation of the lake, describing the advance and retreat of the glaciers in northern Europe, a process which will one day leave a large pool of water next to a fertile stretch of land.  This skillful evocation of geological time has the effect of putting all the petty land squabbles which follow into perspective...

Hardy too contrasts the brilliant, but ephemeral, lives of humans with the land that supplies the backdrop to their existence.  In one passage, he describes a military parade for the King, a dazzling display of English aggression and style:

"...by one o'clock the downs were again bare... They still spread their grassy surface to the sun as on that beautiful morning not, historically speaking, so very long ago; but the king and his fifteen thousand armed men, the horses, the bands of music, the princesses, the cream-coloured teams - the gorgeous centre-piece, in short, to which the downs were but the mere mount or margin - how entirely have they all passed and gone! - lying scattered about the world as military and other dust..." p.76

In setting his story eighty years before the time of writing, Hardy achieves a distance that allows him, and the reader, to see how small and insignificant life can be, even when (at the time) events appear to be of earth-shattering importance.

*****
Two novels chosen without much thought, two entertaining stories - and, as you can see, I did find a lot to connect the two books :)  It just goes to show you that, whatever people may say, when it comes to randomly picking books off a shelf, there's no such thing as chance...

A Journey Through Rural England

As promised in a previous post, July has been reserved for old friends, and my first three books for the month are all very familiar friends indeed.  Let me take you on a little trip through time and space, from the south of England to the north.  It'll be a slow journey, but, I promise you, it will be well worth it...

*****

Our journey starts off down in Wessex, the ancient English kingdom appropriated by the wonderful Thomas Hardy as the setting for his Victorian novels.  Far From the Madding Crowd is a typically bucolic tale, describing a few years in the life of the young and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene.  This headstrong woman, who has decided to take on the running of her uncle's farm alone after his death, is pursued by three very different men: surly Farmer Boldwood; dashing soldier Frank Troy; and the honest, reliable shepherd Gabriel Oak.  While this early novel has a little more cheer than Hardy's later tragedies, there's still a lot that goes wrong for Bathsheba, and plenty of obstacles to overcome before she can settle down in peace.

I first read this at secondary school - and got an almighty telling-off from my English teacher when I did a surprise test in class on the book without having bothered to read any of it (I think it was the question where I said Bathsheba was a farmer with a beard that gave things away...).  Now, I love this book, with its luscious descriptions of the English countryside and its long, leisurely conversations between locals in ramshackle pubs.  Admittedly, Hardy never uses a short word when he can dig up (or invent) a horribly long and complicated one instead, but this minor fault is far outweighed by his elegant storytelling - which is why, on finishing this novel, I went straight to the Book Depository and ordered three more of his works :)

*****

Now let's (reluctantly) leave Wessex and move northwards, over the undulating southern hills, across the pleasant fields of Warwickshire, and onto the tranquil village of Hayslope in the (fictional) hilly county of Loamshire, for here we will encounter a fine example of the turn-of-the-(19th) century workman, Adam Bede.

George Eliot's admirable carpenter is one of the principal figures of her first novel, and throughout its 540 pages, he must learn to use his broad shoulders to support others in their time of need - and to bear the crushing disappointment he encounters in his own affairs.  Adam, a cut above the average English country-dweller (both mentally and physically), is in love with Hetty Sorrel, a beautiful (and empty-headed) young dairymaid.  However, when the heir to the local estates, Arthur Donnithorne, sees the pretty girl, events take an unfortunate and fateful turn (reminiscent of a certain Hardy novel), tainting the lives of all involved.

This novel, which I bought at a second-hand shop while I was living in Japan (and read to death!), has many similarities with Far From the Madding Crowd, and I constantly compare and confuse Adam and Gabriel (in my mind, they both look like an actor I saw in an ITV production of Hardy's novel!).  I'd have to say though that Eliot's story is the better of the two.  It has all of the wonderful depiction of how people in the country really lived, with less of the stark contrast between the language of the story and the philosophising.  Middlemarch is probably a better book, but Adam Bede is definitely my favourite Eliot novel.

*****

Alas, we must keep moving, and the way is becoming less pleasant now.  We pass through the bare, coal-stained hills of Eliot's Stonyshire, skirt the big industrial cities of the north, and venture out onto the wet, wild and windy Yorkshire moors - until we stumble, on completion of our journey, upon a pair of houses isolated on the moors: Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights...

The novel is actually a story within a story (within a story) as a large part of the tale is told third-(and occasionally fourth-) hand by the feisty, and perhaps not all that trustworthy, maidservant Nelly Dean.  Through her long fireside stories to the convalescing tenant of Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood, we learn about the strange events that unfolded in recent years.  All begins when Hareton Earnshaw, the owner of Wuthering Heights, returns from a trip to Liverpool bearing a rather unwelcome sort of gift - a dirty, dark stray who soon comes to be known by the name of Heathcliff.  While Earnshaw's two children are initially repulsed by the intruder, his daughter, Cathy, quickly becomes the best of friends with Heathcliff, a tie which will endure lifelong... and perhaps beyond.

Emily Brontë's classic story is nothing if not divisive (as recent Twitter conversations have shown!), but I love this book.  Melodramatic?  Definitely.  Exaggerated?  Of course.  Stretching reality of behaviour to its limits?  Without doubt.  That's not the point though.  In the self-centred and slightly deranged Cathy, Brontë created one of the most fascinating heroines of the Victorian age (with the best theme tune too!), and as for Heathcliff... well, any character who bangs his head against a tree until it's covered in blood has to be worth engaging with.

This was probably the first piece of serious literature that I ever read (voluntarily anyway), back in those wonderful days when Penguin brought out their one-pound popular classics and widened general access to the literary greats.  I still remember struggling through the book, all the time trying to work out who Cathy/Catherine/Linton/Hareton actually was.  By the end of the novel, despite this difficulty, I was hooked on reading 'proper' books :)

*****
Alas, we must now turn our backs on the world of fiction; our time here is done.  And so, with our journey at an end, it's time to leave 19th-century England behind and return to the realities of 21st-century Melbourne: a large amount of planning to do for next term, a mountain of bills to pay and two noisy (but lovely) daughters to pay attention to.

Until next time :)

Review Post 3 - Of Novels and Telenovelas

OK, no more poetry - I promise...

On finishing The Iliad, I decided (naturally enough) that it was time to read something a little lighter, so my eyes landed on one of the Roddy Doyle books sprawled across one of my long-suffering bookshelves (note to self - operation Bookshelf Overhaul is long overdue!). Most people will have heard of or read (or, more likely, seen) Doyle's The Commitments, the first of the Barrytown trilogy (also the setting for Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha), and The Van is the third of these novels. Set in Dublin in the wondrous year of 1990, amidst the backdrop of the Republic of Ireland's first trip to the World Cup (something more important than non-football followers could ever imagine), The Van takes Jimmy Rabbitte snr. as its main protagonist, following his experiences from unemployment to setting up a mobile fish and chip shop, the van of the title, with his best friend, Bimbo.

It's written in Doyle's usual funny, yet profound, style, giving us an insight into the day of a man who, undereducated and unemployed, has been left to make his own way through the week, drifting from the local golf course to the park, with the occasional pint or two in the evening when he can afford it. The reader can really empathise with Jimmy and his struggle to adapt to time spent alone after an adult life of work (although I, for one, would be quite happy with a bit more spare time), and his attempts to make himself useful to his family are faintly noble.

Doyle also uses the book to muse on adult male relationships, taking the long-term friendship of Jimmy and Bimbo and subjecting it to the pressure-cooker environment (or should that be deep-frier environment?) of their fledgling business. As the money comes in, emotions start to fray: the role reversal whereby the usually dominant Jimmy becomes Bimbo's side-kick, and then employee, places a great strain on their friendship until the tension becomes too much for other people to bear. Now, how do you resolve something like that...

While the gradual breakdown of a lifelong friendship and the nostalgic joy of reliving the halcyon days of Italia '90 made this a pleasure to read, the enjoyment of this novel was tainted at times by the handling of the role of women. Jimmy and his friends have a voyeuristic tendency, and women (and some girls on the cusp of attaining womanhood) are used mainly as objects to be ogled - and later pursued. I'm not doubting the reality of what Doyle has written; it's easy to believe that someone of a certain age, in a time and setting far from today's, would act as Jimmy would and not really think anything of it. It just made me feel a little uncomfortable (and I have seen a couple of reviewers who have agreed with me). That may well have been the point, but this book could well have done with a little more female perspective. Where I felt sorry for Jimmy towards the start of the book, by the end I was a little ambivalent towards him and his greasy endeavours. Which is a shame.

*****

One author who never finds me ambivalent is Thomas Hardy, whose works I started reading again last year (and will continue to enjoy in 2010). After the rolling farmlands of Far from the Madding Crowd and the ominous heaths of The Return of the Native, this time it is the woody glades of Wessex which take centre stage in his novel The Woodlanders.

Grace Melbury, educated beyond her station by her ambitious father, returns to the sylvan Wessex village of Little Hintock unable to fulfil the family promise of a marriage to Giles Winterbourne. Instead, she succumbs to the advances of a local doctor, an outsider from a higher social background, but with lower morals. I think we can all see that there won't be many happily ever afters here...

It's a lovely little read, if not a patch on his major works, and, as always, you can almost imagine yourself transported to the leafy glades by Hardy's measured prose (even if he never uses a couple of short words where a complicated - and occasionally invented - Greek-based word will do). The book abounds with love triangles and unrequited passions, and the moral seems to be to choose wisely before rushing into wedlock, especially if you're marrying above/below your station. Hardy also reflects on the unfairness of the law, particularly as regards the differing ease with which men and women were able to obtain divorces in olden days (I wonder if he'd be happier now...). Something to reflect on when remembering your wedding vows.

*****

Where Hardy is restraint and pastoral calm, my most recent book is passion and despair, usually in equal and mixed up proportions. Just as you may have heard that some bloke called Shakespeare is a fairly famous writer of English, you've probably come across the name Goethe in the context of German literature. As an avid reader, and a modern languages graduate, I am a little ashamed to say that I had never read anything by the great man - until now, that is.

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) is an epistolary (or letter form) novel, in which the Werther of the title, a young, romantic German, pours out the contents of his overflowing heart to his friend Wilhelm. Escaping city life for nature, Werther settles in a small town where he meets the angelic Lotte - and promptly falls head-over-heels in love. Sadly, despite their mutual understanding and attraction, their relationship can only be platonic as Lotte is promised to another man. So begins Werther's slow spiral into depression, madness and suicide...

This novel is one of the most famous Sturm und Drang works, and it is certainly stormy. On reading the first part of the novel, I was blown away by the intensity of the writing and the openness of emotion which Goethe breathed into his literary alter-ego. Werther is actually a mixture of the young Goethe's own obsession with a young woman called Lotte and the fate of a friend who ended his life at an early age. Although embarrassed by this early work later in life (he was only 25 when he wrote this - bloody geniuses...), it was an instant Europe-wide hit and found many admirers and Werther copycats. Of course, the church was not so happy with Goethe as some of those copycats went a little too far; in fact, the work was seen as an apology for those committing suicide.

A word of warning for anyone wanting to read this book in German; written in 1774, you may be a little surprised by what you see on the page. The original text varies ever so slightly from modern German, with several common and consistent spelling conventions different from today's, slight grammatical variations and a few vocabulary peculiarities. In fairness though, once you have waded through a few pages (removing redundant 'h's and swapping a few vowels around), it is surprisingly easy to read, provided you have a fairly high standard of German (and a high tolerance for chest beating, hair pulling and teeth gnashing).
Is it any good? Definitely. The prose is breath-takingly vivid at times, and Goethe drags the reader along as Werther swings between the highs of his halcyon days in Lotte's company to the lows of his attempts to come to terms with the impossibility of his desires. While the cynic in me did at times long to give him a slap and say "get over it, you cretin", it was a small voice at the back of my head and was usually drowned out by the passion Werther poured into his outbursts of grief and declarations of love.

Ready for Faust? I might give it a few months...

*****

From the sublime to the ridiculous we go as I explain what that i-Pod is doing amongst the books in my post photo. Well, having eventually succumbed to the temptation of upgrading my trusty, battered old i-Pod Mini to a sleek new Classic before Christmas, and having finally got around to upgrading my internet connection to Broadband, I am now able to download video podcasts (and able to time that process with a watch rather than a calendar). Which brings me to Alisa - Folge deinem Herzen (Alisa - Follow your Heart), a telenovela which has been running on the German channel ZDF since March last year.

Now, you may not think of me as the type of person to be obsessed with kitschy telly programmes (and you'd be right - I'm far too intellectual for all that. No, really...), but watching rubbish is a great way to practice languages. I think I got more from watching a couple of years of the soap opera Unter Uns than from three years of German at university. As a language teacher myself, I encourage students to watch programmes like Neighbours and Home and Away as they model the kind of language people use every day - and there's a limit to how much news the average language student really wants to watch.

Anyway, Alisa runs for about 40 minutes every day, Monday to Friday, and follows the trials and tribulations of Alisa Lenz, who has come back to live with her adopted parents in the small town of Schönroda after a failed business (and relationship) in Berlin. The angelic-looking Alisa, played by Teresa Scholze (who, were she British, would be a certainty to be playing Cinderella in pantomime next Christmas), stumbles across Christian, a sensitive, good-looking man (I don't know the actor's name, but I bet he's played Prince Charming a few times in his career) who happens to be the son and heir of the powerful local Castellhof family. Can you see where this is going yet?

In her first week in Schönroda, Alisa manages to seriously annoy Christian's uncle (who is then revealed to be the one interviewing her for her new job), save Christian's sister from drowning and get on the wrong side of Christian's fiancee, Ellen (who, conveniently, is as dark and brooding as Alisa is blonde and bubbly; good witch - evil witch, anyone?). Throw in a stereotypically over-exuberant Italian woman who, despite speaking perfect German, has a huge accent and starts every sentence with an Italian word, a mean supervisor who has been instructed to get rid of Alisa at all costs and a family doctor who appears to be keeping a dark secret about one of the Castellhofs, and you have the set-up for the rest of the show. Oh, did I mention that Alisa accidentally saw Ellen in flagrante with Christian's Uncle Oskar in his office on her first day of work? Now if this series does not end in a wedding, I'll eat my i-Pod.


While it's depressing how low your standards sink when you're looking for free programmes in a foreign language, I must confess that it's all good entertainment. Yes, the dialogue is stilted, the characters are caricatures, and everyone has more secrets than I could hope to accumulate in a lifetime. Still, it's a pleasant way to while away an idle hour, and we can't be reading Goethe all the time now, can we?

Oh, alright, I admit it: I'm addicted...

65 - 'The Return of the Native' by Thomas Hardy

Out on the wild and windy moors... Sorry, wrong book (just having a Kate Bush moment there). The reason for this lapse into song is that Thomas Hardy's well-loved Wessex Tale, 'The Return of the Native', depends just as much on the natural environment and its claustrophobic (and paradoxically neverending) moorlands as Kate B.. . Emily Bronte's novel 'Wuthering Heights' does. The star of the show is not, in my opinion, the returning native of the title, Clym Yeobright, or his proud and flighty wife, Eustacia Vye, but the magnificent setting of Egdon Heath, an expanse of heathland which provides the backdrop for the drama without ever fading into the background.

The images of the first couple of chapters are among some of my favourite pieces of writing as Hardy introduces the primeval heath, a place scarcely altered by human hand and yet showing subtle signs of bygone civilisations. The brambles and heather growing wild on the ground are given a life of their own, and when human figures finally appear on the scene, they seem to be almost an afterthought to the descriptions of the countryside which have gone before. When Eustacia makes her first appearance, standing on top of the ancient 'barrow', or burial mound, which the locals call Rainbarrow, she appears to be a natural extension of the landscape, rather than a person.

This is far from the truth though. In fact, Eustacia, a woman of good birth living on the heath with her grandfather, feels trapped and isolated by its expanses and longs to get away. It is this desire to return to civilisation which drives her on to the unfortunate relationships (first with Damon Wildeve, then later with Clym) which form the seed of tragedy in this tale. It is only natural that when an educated native returns to his home village after years working in Paris, the excitable Eustacia should latch on to him as a means of escape.

Clym, however, turning his back on his luxurious, but ultimately unsatisfying, life abroad, is determined to make a new start in his home surroundings. His over-romantic attachment to his native soil is just as exaggerated as Eustacia's aversion to it, and his attempts to reestablish himself there are doomed to failure. Despite his intention to do good and raise the country folk from their state of relative ignorance, his decision to come home is met with confusion, ridicule and a complete lack of understanding (from both family and friends), with most people concurring with Eustacia's view that a return to Paris would be for the best.

As with many of Hardy's novels, the writing is beautiful (if slightly over-complicated at times), and the portrayal of rustic life and rituals is without equal. The major events of rural life, including the Guy Fawkes night bonfires, the Christmas 'mumming' play and the springtime Maypole dances are used as a backdrop to important occurrences in the novel. This picture of an England which is long gone (and was disappearing even at the time of writing) shows us a part of our cultural heritage which, perhaps, is not commonly known today. Despite the general idyllic feeling though, the story moves inexorably towards tragedy.

Another of Hardy's quirks is the tendency of his characters to end up in trouble, and 'The Return of the Native' is no exception. Chance, misfortune, frustration and boredom combine to inspire Eustacia to escape from her married life, and, as the rains lash down, and the major players are drawn inevitably together on the heath, the only question is who will come through the ordeal alive (if not totally unscathed).

The book ends, just as it started, on the wild vastness of Egdon Heath. The situations of the major characters have changed; some for the better, many for the worse (to put it mildly...). Whatever the feelings of the people sitting listening to the lecture delivered from the top of Rainbarrow, the heath itself is unchanged, quietly alive, seemingly endless. Oh yes, whether wuthering or not, it is the heath which is the true star of this book.

56 - 'Under the Greenwood Tree' by Thomas Hardy

'Under the Greenwood Tree', one of Hardy's earliest (and shortest) novels, takes place against the usual backdrop of the imaginary county of Wessex early in the nineteenth century and is structured around two main plot strands: Dick Dewy's pursuit of the beautiful new schoolteacher, Fancy Day, and the last days of Mellstock's traditional church choir, replaced by the new trend of organ music. Both stories help the writer to discuss what was to become one of his central themes, namely the rapid disappearance of country life and traditions in the face of progress exported from the big cities to the English countryside, an alteration that Hardy believed was not always for the best.

One of the reasons for the change in lifestyle was the arrival of newcomers in what had been relatively stable communities. Fancy, flighty by name and nature, comes to Mellstock to work as a schoolteacher, and immediately causes several hearts to flutter. As well as the good-hearted tranter's son, Dick Dewy (what do you think I am Wikipedia? Look it up yourself...), both Farmer Shiner and Reverend Maybold, the newly arrived vicar of Mellstock, fall under Fancy's spell. Over the course of a year (the book's four main sections are named after the seasons), we see the progress of Dick's pursuit of the beautiful outsider, which is eventually crowned with success - but not without a few hurdles on the way, at least one of which comes as a bit of a bombshell...

As interesting and well written as the lovers' tale is though, Hardy himself was more interested in the accompanying story regarding the choir (or quire!). The story begins on Christmas Eve as the choir prepares to make its traditional rounds of the outlying houses, men carrying string instruments and their own voices, highly critical of the trend toward organ music replacing the traditional church choirs. Little do they know that there is soon to be an end to their right to play the hymns in church as two of the contestants for Fancy's hand in marriage discover her ability to play the church organ and decide to use this skill in Sunday services (ironically, the third suitor, Dick, is part of the choir...). While disappointed, the choir take the decision on the chin and, rather than causing trouble, agree a timetable for change with the vicar, allowing the proud old men an opportunity to retire on a high.

Hardy actually wanted to call this book 'The Mellstock Quire' (and chose the actual title on his publisher's advice as books with titles from songs sold better - plus ca change...), and the story of the choir has its roots in actual events from the author's life. While the introduction of organ music was seen by some as an imrovement to church services, Hardy argued that the downgrading of the role of the parishioners in the service had the effect of distancing them from the church. Whereas before a group of local men, young and old, were motivated to appear each Sunday and use their leisure time to practice together, the new regime had the result of creating an 'us and them' mentality which loosened the bond the villagers had with their religion,a bond which had just as much to do with community as communion.

In this book, despite the problems noted above, things turn out for the best. The novel ends with the expected wedding festivities under the Greenwood tree, and the villagers dance and feast as they have done for generations. However, by the time of the publication of this book, the customs described were, for the most part, long gone, leaving a bitter-sweet taste of nostalgia on the lips of the original audience (let alone on those of the 21st-century reader!). This book, short and sweet as it is, does end happily, but Hardy was to develop these ideas in his later works; as anyone who has read 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' or 'Jude the Obscure' knows, his later novels were a little more scathing in their criticism of modern life.

47 - 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy

So, a man walks into a pub with his wife and their daughter and says that he'll sell the wife off to the highest bidder. Then a sailor walks in, slaps five guineas on the table and says, "I'll take you up on that mate, no worries". The first man (slightly perturbed to meet an Australian in an English literature classic) mulls it over and takes the money, and the sailor, the woman and the child leave the pub. This is not a joke; this is the set-up for the Thomas Hardy novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'.

We rejoin Michael Henchard, the man with the slightly relaxed attitude to marital ties, in the town of Casterbridge, where he is now the Mayor. Almost twenty years of hard work and abstinence from alcohol (you didn't think he was sober when he sold off his wife, did you?) has enabled him to rise to a respectable place in rural society, an effort which is, in effect, an attempt at atonement for his youthful faux-pas. Having failed to locate his wife after sobering up the day after the 'sale', you can imagine his surprise when his daughter pays him a slightly unexpected visit. Reunited with his family, he swiftly 'courts' and remarries his wife, whose other husband is presumed lost at sea, but, from that moment on, his success in life begins to fade away; one by one, other ghosts reappear from the past to haunt the powerless Henchard until he is forced to leave Casterbridge the same way he arrived, as a wandering labourer.

Henchard is portrayed throughout as aggressive, arrogant, headstrong and jealous, yet Hardy's novel was sub-titled 'The Life and Death of a Man of Character', suggesting that the reader is meant to sympathise in some way with the main character. While it may seem difficult, having glanced through my review, to understand how Henchard could possibly be seen in a sympathetic light, on closer reading of the book, he does have many redeeming features. He is generous, quick to make friends and loyal to those who support him (and honourable to a fault in his dealings both with his former and latter wife, and the woman who almost replaced her). A lesser man may have fallen less quickly (or not at all), but the same stubborness which shows itself negatively can also be turned to a steadfast belief in what is right over what is comfortable for him.

Of course, in today's society, family dramas are perhaps not as big an issue as they were for the highly moral (or secretly depraved and publicly hypocritical...) Victorians, but as followers of politics could tell you, any hint of a less-than-spotless past can have a huge effect on the career of a public figure, especially if it only comes to light decades after the original mishap. Hardy describes the tribulations of Henchard and his former lover, Lucetta, noting that the fact of their sins being long unknown (through being committed outside the realm of Casterbridge) is greatly to their disadvantage; youthful indiscretions are much more likely to be forgiven by people who have had years to get used to them and to measure them against subsequent actions.

Whether you're planning to be a hay trusser or a state M.P., one lesson you can learn from this book is that while it's a long way to the top (as AC/DC once remarked), it's actually a lot faster on the downhill stretch. Anything that happens in your life, no matter how stupid or insignificant it can seem at the time, may well come back to bite you on the behind twenty-odd years down the track (something to consider for those of you with particularly embarrassing photos on your Facebook page...). However, there is something else that we can all learn from Hardy's excellent novel; never, no matter how mad, or drunk, you are at the time, should you attempt to sell your partner (not even if it happens to be legal wherever you are at the time). I can guarantee that it will not end well.

And if you must, at least get your exchange policy sorted out in case the buyer wants their money back.

20 - 'Tess of the D'Urbevilles' by Thomas Hardy

Tess, Tess, Tess; what a bloody mess.

An accurate description of my thoughts about Hardy's most tragic of heroines and the book itself (but not in a bad way). Confused? Let's start again.

Reading this book is like watching a film about a famous person who died at an early age; you revel in their charm and success and think and hope and pray that events will conspire to turn out for the best every time, but, of course, they never do. Poor old Tess is doomed to make the same mistakes, whether they be of her own making or not, for all eternity, as much as the reader wants things to turn out for the best. For a twenty-first century reader, the tragedy is arguably greater as Tess does not really commit any great sin by our standards, and the punishment which comes her way thus seems disproportionate to the 'crime'. That is, of course, until the fatal denouement...

A book which came to mind while reading this one was George Eliot's tale of country folk and a fallen woman, 'Adam Bede'. Both novels tell of the tragedy of a country girl courted (in slightly differing circumstances) by a man from a higher social class, and both heroines suffer for being caught up in affairs outside their social sphere (and both, in different ways, eventually pay the ultimate price for their sins). As well as Hetty Sorrel's being a far more willing participant in events than Tess, the main point of contrast, however, between the two tales is that Eliot's centre of focus is the honest yeoman, Adam, who wishes to marry Hetty himself. Hardy's focus on the woman in the middle, 'seduced' (read raped) by one gentleman and abandoned by the other is bolder by far; much too bold, in fact, for Victorian audiences.

I first read this book in a different edition about a decade ago and vaguely remembered something about a mock marriage which was the cause for Angel Clare's treatment of Tess. So when I read the edition I'd picked up at 'Borders', I was slightly surprised (to say the least) to find that this part of the plot had been replaced by what was, for the times, a pretty obvious reference to rape. This was actually the version Hardy chose to publish in 1891 and was the plot he had not been allowed to release when the novel was being serialised in various publications (as was the norm in the Victorian era). The highly annotated version I bought included various emmendments, alternative versions of the story and references to several different editions of the text; 'Tess' is less a book than a shared myth, seemingly told (or at least published!) in a different form each time it is released.

Hardy famously eventually got sick of the moral sniping his works received, abandoning the novel fomat after 'Jude the Obscure' was similarly cut by timorous editors and slaughtered by zealous moralists, something that current authors should be grateful they do not have to go through (although some see shocking the public as a badge of honour and would be happy to be attacked in the same way!). This constant criticism of Hardy's 'pure woman' is hard to grasp as Tess is blameless for D'Urbeville's conduct; by today's standards, Angel, who leaves his new wife and condemns her to a life of hardship and her subsequent submission to her rapist's advances, seems as worthless a man as Alec and deserves everything he gets.

Like Eliot, Hardy portrays the country folk of England in the eighteenth century as they really were. The traditions of the past centuries still survive, but the intrusion of modernity and urban life, the inheritance of the industrial revolution, has started to take its toll on country life. The author is succesful in his attempt to make the pastoral dwellers individual and human, and the cycles of the country year, so alien to the modern, city-dwelling reader, appear as real as our own tax years and football seasons. However, the whole book is overshadowed by the fore-knowledge of the tragedy to come. Just like Romeo and Juliet, we know, from a shared cultural knowledge, that Tess is doomed; this sense of fatalism makes reading this book, as vibrant and well written as it, a difficult task. It's a far cry from some of his earlier works, such as the (comparatively) cheery 'Far from the Madding Crowd', and I finished the book with a heavy heart and a sense of regret for a woman wronged.

Poor, poor Tess. Gone, but definitely not forgotten.