The Complete Hardy: 1. Desperate Remedies

Perhaps in the end all fiction is 'genre fiction'. Don Quixote was chivalric, albeit pastiche, The Woman in White is a detective story, The Turn of the Screw a ghost story and once one reads Desperate Remedies and finds it comes from the tradition of the lurid C19th 'sensation novel' then so are Tess, Jude and Casterbridge.

It's rarely difficult to differentiate the goodies from the baddies in Hardy and here, in the first published novel, Manston is a scoundrel in the same mould as Alec d'Urberville, lacking the capacity for self-awareness and regret that even Michael Henchard is later capable of and it's human motivations more than those of the fates that propel the drama although we are allowed a happy ending which we are to be denied in the big, mature masterpieces. 

Some Hardy set pieces are already in place with neither readers or characters always sure of their circumstances due to the absence of some characters not necessarily being due to them being dead. Hardy was not only an architect of buildings but also of storylines but the poet he first set out to be and eventually became, along with his deep knowledge of scripture and folklore all combine to make him compelling reading and if other, mostly later, prose fiction writers are more sophisticated in their art, he inevitably takes a high place among the best of them.

Owen Graye, devoted brother of the lovely Cytherea, reports to her what their father had told him,

'..don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all...Cultivate the art of renunciation.'

In his own commentary, Hardy observes that,

It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most;

Mr. Springrove, father of the 'good guy' suitor, Edward, tells Cytherea that Edward has,

seen too far into things- been discontented with makeshifts- thinken o' perfection in things, and then sickened that there's no such thing as perfection. 

All of those things are surely distilled, if downbeat, wisdom that form and equation with the outcome that,

'the difference between a common man and a recognised poet, is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days', which is Edward ahead of his time in the mid-C19th when 'poet' could still equate to 'dreamy idealist'.

Whether Hardy ever translated any of these philosophies into his own life is doubtful but as a writer he was aware of them whatever his shortcomings outside of his fiction.

 

It was much to do with Hardy that reading took up its central position in my life and he's lost nothing in the fifty years since. Next up is The Trumpet Major as I make my way towards some sort of completeness. He is the most solidly reliable of authors and from hereon in his books will only be punctuated by others so that I don't mix them up and begin to wonder what's happened to a character from the book I was reading the previous week.