I like to try to review books as soon as I can after publication. Apologies that this appears 140 years after its first appearance in print.
Being given The Woodlanders or The Mayor of Casterbridge to read for homework at school in about 1975 must have been some kind of turning point for me, the sort of thing that happened on the road to Damascus for others in biblical times if not now. Homework was supposed to be some sort of drudgery and yet that was a pure pleasure. It reminds me of the remark I've seen since by Terry Eagleton that he is amazed to have been paid for reading literature all his life, as if he earned a living by sunbathing or self-abuse. But it has been a long time since I read a Hardy novel and so I took A Pair of Blue Eyes on holiday. It is an early effort but it is still a brilliantly done thing with many of the unlikely plot techniques of the later masterpieces but equally with any number of wonderful insights into human nature, like,
Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and complexion, belonging to the 'interesting' class of women, where that class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to enjoy nothing.
To think that Hardy foresaw Victoria Beckham 120 years before the fact.
Hardy's plots remind me of a G7 chord on the guitar, or any seventh chord, in which a note is added that moves us into the next chord. I believe it happens in songs like I Wanna Hold Your Hand by The Beatles. The determinism, almost fatalism, of Hardy's world view is helped along by the clearest of hints and the placing of small incidents that openly suggest what is going to happen next and yet you still need to read on to see it happen. Patrick Hamilton builds a similar sense of inevitability in his stories. Hardy was an architect and so one can see how he understood it. Hamilton liked golf, though. Surely only the very best golfers can play a round with quite such sureness about what will happen next.
Mrs. Jethway, the mother of the first victim of a love for Elfride Swancourt, haunts most of the book like an unexploded hand grenade. Social divisions are a terrible obstacle to 'love' but social mobility shifts those about almost as dangerously as the changing tides of a young girl's affections. One sees the action for the most part through Elfride's young and innocent blue eyes and so one is not too quick to blame her for the mounting pile of heartbreak victims but the bookish intellectual, Henry Knight, isn't quite as sophisticated as he might seem in this mess of unworldliness and so ultimately it is that prized virtue of innocence that one has to blame for so much hurt so expertly described.
The past is, as it was always going to be in Hardy, ready to spoil the future. A lost earring here and a premonition of a further precarious encounter a long way above a precipitous fall are other incidents positioned beautifully by Hardy's fastidiously planned story. We find ourselves where we were a few chapters before, but in a new situation, astonishingly often but brilliantly. And when Stephen, the young architect, and Knight meet on their way back to try to reclaim Elfride in a classic piece of hopeless Hardy irony,
There followed that want of words which will always assert itself between nominal friends who find that they have ceased to be real ones,
and all that Hardy has so carefully compiled unravels in deepening sadness.
It is unfair to have embarked straightaway on another novel by a young, contemporary writer because it stands no chance in comparison with a so-called 'minor' novel of a genius like Hardy but one has to read something next. Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration isn't much like her Professor of Poetry, but it is amusing in its way and not to be underestimated. I just wonder if it would have got a fairer reading if I hadn't moved straight into it after this book, a long overdue return to Hardy. It will be nowhere near as long before the next.
It was free to borrow from Portsmouth Central Library. Can you believe that. All I have to do is take it back.
