The Complete Hardy 2. The Trumpet Major

If you're a great writer and wrote 14 novels, one of them has to be the least impressive. What I have difficulty with is comparing the lesser work to that of other, maybe lesser, writers. One might think more of The Trumpet Major if it were not by Hardy and it could be raised up by saying it could have been whereas since it is by him it comes off worse up against Tess, The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders.

It has the same ingredients as the likes of Far From the Madding Crowd with its three more, or less, suitors pressing their suits on the eligible Anne Garland with the Loveday brothers being good candidates and Festus Derriman clearly not. But if Festus is undesirable he is comically so, being pestering and duplicitous rather than dastardly like Alec d'Urberville.

George III makes a cameo appearance perhaps not unlike the then Prince Charles having a part in Coronation Street as he once did. It's perfectly good as a book and only suffers in the way that Don Paterson said of the lesser of Shakespeare's sonnets, that when he says they aren't very good he means 'for Shakespeare', which still means 'good' by ordinary standards. One would certainly not, though, want to read it ahead of the more justly better-known titles.

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Breaking up the sequence before moving on to The Well-Beloved, I was grateful for a recommendation that came out of reaction to Romanticism.

Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach is gorgeously short with the Dedalus edition's pages flying by, illustrated as it is by unpeopled photographs of the place. It's also morbid, both haunting and haunted as Hugues, after the death of his beloved wife, goes to live in the atmospheric other-world of Bruges which we might care to compare with Amsterdam in La Chute by Camus, Venice in Don't Look Now or even Hamlet's Elsinore.

Hugues finds a doppelganger of his wife in Jane, an actress but, as we saw in The Trumpet Major with Matilda, 'actress' is shorthand for 'trouble'. It's a poem of a novel even given the ever-present caveat of it being in translation and maintains its sepulchral beauty until the shift up in gear of the denouement. Perhaps, so brief, it is long enough because the urge in the first half to immediately order everything else by Rodenbach had subsided a little bit by the end but it's way ahead of its time, psychologically or 'modernly' and more Rodenbach in due course is a definite possibility.