Last year I spent a lot of time reading George Eliot and sharing a few highlights here. She wasn't exactly a new discovery but it's not often I systematically read an author quite as diligently as I did her because I'm not often impressed enough by any of them to go to quite those lengths.
I felt a little bit guilty at the way I allowed her to sweep so majestically to such a position in my estimation because although I've never been a big fan of Dickens, Thomas Hardy has been a big favourite ever since we were given The Woodlanders to read for O level Eng Lit.
But, waiting for new books to arrive, I went in search of interim reading matter in the upstairs room and came back down with The Return of the Native. I began it donkey's years ago but left it aside at an early stage, unable to get beyond the grim foreboding of Egdon Heath. But, what a wonderful thing it is and, if George Eliot seems somehow more metropolitan and sophisticated then Hardy, re-stating his case for fate, determinism and some rustic comedy in no uncertain terms, is possibly doing something on a larger, more Classical scale.
I daresay Tess is Hardy's best known novel, in a career that abandoned fiction for poetry at roughly the turn of that century but included architecture as well, but among those major Wessex novels I retained a preference for my first love, as a Hardy character might, and admired the way that he multiplies the capacity for loss and missed opportunites by expanding the customary eternal triangle into a concatenation of five caught in romantic hopes and ambitions that, I'm sure, in The Return of the Native will prove as heartbreaking as it did in The Woodlanders.
Whereas there, on a rising scale of social status, we had Marty South, Giles Winterbourne, Grace Melbury, Dr. Edred Fitzpiers and Felice Charmond, in The Return it is Diggory Venn, Thomasin Yeobright, Damon Wildeve, Eustacia Vye and the native returning from his excursions among Parisian elegance, Clym Yeobright. In The Woodlanders, Hardy achieved a brilliant point by making the linear relationship circular when Felice attracts the ambitious doctor in a wig made of hair sold by Marty, who needed to sacrifice it for the money. But please don't tell me if anything similar happens in The Return.
I'm well aware that Eustacia is not intended to be admired. I'm not entirely sure what she's doing stuck in the outback of Egdon Heath when she longs for the glamour even of Budmouth but, whatever devious devices she employs in pursuit of her vain ambitions, she was immediately a candidate for my shortlist of favourite fictional characters (and I realize that Maggie Tulliver is much more worthy) when she first appears,
To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow;
and I reckon winters in rural Dorset in 1878 were considerably darker than our urban winters now.
In lines like those, Hardy came convincingly back to make it clear that George Eliot can't just swan in and deprive him of his long-held position among the Greatest Novelists in My Opinion.
There's plenty more to come. Real life can be hilarious, hugely entertaining and possibly even gorgeous if you can perceive it to be but, seen through a book like this with it all done for you, fiction is almost preferable.
I'm looking forward to the new Graham Swift but it can arrive whenever it feels like it. If it had arrived earlier, I might not have gone back to The Return of the Native and that would have been a tragedy in itself.