Thomas Hardy: Wessex Tales

NEVILLE JASON

Hardy's novels, in my experience (admittedly a long time ago, when I was going through a serious misery-lit phase), are emotional marathons. They leave you drained, desolate, in shock but ultimately satisfied that you finished the course. Ever since listening to Clare Tomalin's biography, The Time-torn Man, I've been meaning to dig out Tess, Jude, Bathsheba, Eustacia and the rest of the Wessex clan, but it will be a mission. I need an incentive. Here it is. Five minutes into the second tale, "The Three Strangers", you can feel the old Hardy magic beginning to work its spell. The scene has been set, where else but on his favourite stamping ground (trudging ground might be a better word), the bare, dark, rain-sodden, wind-lashed heath five miles from Casterbridge (Dorchester to you), where "the tails of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside out like umbrellas". In a small, lonely hut, shepherd Fennel, his dairymaid wife and 19 guests are celebrating the birth of a new baby beside a crackling fire with mead, victuals, music and dancing. Then comes a knock at the door. "Walk in!" cries our merry host, the latch clicks and in comes a stranger, "dark in complexion and not unprepossessing as to feature", hat "hung low over his eyes", which take in the room "with a flash more than a glance" and like what they see. "The rain is so heavy, friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile," he says in a deep, rich voice. Leave is given and a pull of the mead mug, and minutes later there's another knock, and in comes a second dripping stranger, who turns out to be the hangman on his way to Casterbridge to top a sheep-stealer in the morning. I'd forgotten what a consummate yarn-spinner Hardy is. Roald Dahl's end-of-story twists are famous, but Hardy's tales surprise you all the way through, holding your attention as firmly as old Solomon Selby does his audience's at the tavern in "A Tradition of 1804". As soon as they see him take his pipe from his mouth and smile into the fire from his inglenook seat, they know what's coming. "The smile was neither mirthful nor sad, not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him recognised it in a moment. It was his narrative smile." And thus begins the wonderful tale of young Selby's encounter on a Wessex clifftop with Old Boney himself, recce-ing the long-planned invasion of England with one of his Frenchie generals.

Price: $44.98