The latest three novels I have been reading are Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson and, now, A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy.
I wonder quite how Zuleika gets onto any list of the Top 100 Novels, as suggested by Robert McCrum in The Observer but I share the affliction of list-making and understand how such things can happen. It was good enough fun while it lasted.
But in all three novels, and possibly some before them, I did stop a few times and wonder at certain phrases or figures of speech at how surprised I was to find them used by those authors. Some usage I found in Donna Tartt I thought were specifically English and I didn't expect to see them in an American book; some things in Beerbohm seemed to me quite recent and I didn't think they would have been current in 1911 but whenever one looks up the first coining of a word it usually turns out to be at least 50 years before one thought, if not a few hundred.
But in the first section of A Laodicean- and heaven knows what a joy it is to be reading Hardy again- the young architect, Somerset, somewhat besotted by his new employer, Paula, is invited to her forthcoming garden party,
'It is on the nineteenth. Don't forget the day'
He met her eyes in such a way that, if she were a woman, she must have seen the meaning as plainly as words: 'Do I look as if I could forget anything you say!'
Every reader surely knows what Hardy means by this, the supreme value that the besotted puts on every hint or utterance of their beloved. It is also another of any number of reminders of why I really should abandon all hope of writing anything called a novel when such a disregarded item in Hardy's work can include such insights as a throwaway in so few lines.
But mostly, it is this 'Do I look as if..' construction that I thought might be incongruous in something written in 1880. Of course, it isn't - because Hardy did it. But I associate it now with the chippy, challenging, attitudinal response of a post-punk rock generation, a teenager taking exception to criticism from another circa 2005, like something from The Catherine Tate Show,
Am I bovvered. Do I look as if I'm bovvered.
Except it isn't. It is from the lost world of Thomas Hardy's Dorset in the late C19th.
So, by all means, if you have teenage children and you ask them to tidy their bedroom and they say, 'Do I look as if I want to tidy my bedroom' (which is probably what I would have said when I was 14 if the idiom had been in vogue in 1974), then you need not concern yourself that they are recalcitrant, taciturn and unmanageable. They are using inter-textual modes of expression and, for once, not lazily insisting on referring back to the old stand-bys of Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw, Horace, Dante or Chaucer but have diversified into Thomas Hardy. Applaud them and be glad of it.