The Complete Hardy 7 : Under the Greenwood Tree

Under the Greenwood Tree is the lightweight one, isn't it, being so fewer pages than the other, more intricately-designed novels. ostensibly happy and it's surely his answer to As You Like It, would you not say.

But if an artist so deep and complex as Shostakovich could provide Classic FM with such an interlude as The Gadfly then maybe Hardy could give his view of an irretrieveably doomed existence a day off.

And he surely does with his cast of rustic types observed with the sort of condescension that such talented, writerly sorts will always make comic material from those maybe not as gifted in the literary arts as they are but who, fictional though they may be, seem to be happier with their allotted status than Hardy's genius made him.

It wouldn't be a Hardy book if the girl married the man she should having seen off the attempts of the two less convincing candidates without us having doubts it was for the best. Whereas in other books, Tess, Bathsheba, Sue Brideshead and others are heroines, you never get the same feeling about Fancy Day who fancies herself far above any suitor and, maybe, why shouldn't she although women's rights might not have got as far as thinking as much by 1872 when a wife was apparently the equivalent of a buttonhole for a man, hoping to appear at least not to reduce his status and, if possible, enhance it.

We are not left with the happy ending we might think it is. We're not that daft. What makes  Under the Greenwood Tree so good is that it's done you with its story of the band being superseded in the church services, its community of yokels steeped in their long traditions, all that gorgeous Dorset countryside stuff that looked even for him, never mind us, like a lost paradise. It's not like that at all.

Dick Dewey can hardly be blamed for being infatuated with Fancy Day but Fancy Day only wants someone to be infatuated with her. 

Coming with perhaps more of Hardy's insightful observations of humam behaviour - because for the few few chapters not much happens apart from that- it is, almost from line to line, perfect company. It wouldn't be right to say it's not his best book because it isn't tragic enough. It's not his best book because it's not as 'big' as some of the others.