When Thomas Hardy is good, he is very very good. I think The Mayor of Casterbridge shows him at his best -- it's a wonderful, tragic , totally absorbing novel and if you haven't read it, you really should. There's a lot to be said for Tess of the Durbervilles and Jude the Obscure too, though perhaps more to criticise at times. And I also love Hardy's poetry, though not everyone does. So I thought I'd be on fairly safe ground when I recommended The Return of the Native to my book group, even though I'd never read it myself.
Sadly, this was not a howling success. In fact very few people read it and even fewer liked it -- and that, I'm afraid, includes me. I was amazed to read in the introduction to the rather clunky old edition I was reading (not this nice one in the picture) that this was Hardy's most popular novel, and I honestly cannot imagine why this might be. It certainly has its moments, and the best of them for me were the descriptions of Egdon Heath, the setting of the novel, which were wonderfully vivid and really, as one book club person said, make the Heath into an important extra character in the novel. But the rest of the characters were a pretty unappealing bunch, I thought. Well, I quite liked Diggory Venn, the reddleman, whose face, body and clothes have been dyed red from the sheep-marking dyes he sells from his caravan -- a great image, and quite a nice bloke, really. But that's more than can be said for Damon Wildeve, the innkeeper, who carries on philandering on the very eve of his marriage. The person he's philandering with is Eustacia Vye, around whom the novel really revolves. Beautiful and discontented, she has landed up in her grandfather's cottage on Egdon Heath but dreams of Paris and the high life. This leads her to make an unfortunate marriage, to Clym Yeobright (the native himself) who returns to the Heath after a successful career in Paris, but decides he's had enough of the bright lights and wants to become a schoolmaster. Eustacia just can't believe he'll stick to it, but worse is to follow -- he studies so hard that he loses his sight and has to become a furse cutter, and there she is, cooped up in a tiny cottage with a man who is either out working or flat out asleep.
This certainly is a bad show, and I suppose Hardy meant us to feel sympathy for Eustacia? or maybe not. I certainly didn't -- I couldn't really see any redeeming features at all. She seems totally self-obsessed and quite unable to feel any warmth towards her poor husband once she accepts that he's never going to give her the life she longs for. But Clym is a bit wooden and uncommunicative and no doubt would have been a pretty irritating person to live with. Anyway it all ends really badly for just about everyone, which of course is standard for a Hardy novel. I also got annoyed with Hardy's habit of interjecting learned references to the classics, and started skipping those bits.
The novel was made into a TV movie in 1994 and starred Catherine Zeta Jones. I haven't seen it and can't say I'll be seeking it out!
