The pastoral nature of this novel is such a disguise for it ends with the toughest, grittiest and most challenging ending I have ever read (stronger than Kafka's 'The Trial', or Christopher Priest's 'The Separation'). As a human being facing what we all face this ending is truly awful.
But what is Hudson telling us in this novel? Is it a Victorian approach to telling things that are otherwise inexpressible - that affection is not enough? That real love with all its manifestations must be honoured, because without it there is only death?
Here I find a challenge to psychoanalysis and all the techniques of psychology: 'I only discovered, what others have discovered before me, that the practice of introspection has a corrosive effect on the mind, which only serves to aggravate the malady it is intended to cure.' (If only I could stop introspection ......!) ) [page 279 Dutton edition of 1917]
But here the common man, Smith, plunged into this affectionate pastoral society, bemoans what he has just learned - that the young woman he loves can never love him as he wishes - 'I wish that I had never made that fatal discovery, that I might have continued still hoping and dreaming, and wearing out my heart with striving after the impossible, since any fate would have been preferable to the blank desolation which now confronted me.' [page 303-304 of the same edition]
I wonder what woman of Hudson's acquaintance he had to put aside with such enormous regret that he expressed these words!
Search this book out. Absorb its gentle fantasy and hold tight for a rough ending.
Other recommendations:
The Separation - Christopher Priest
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Shepherd's Life - W H Hudson
Green Mansions - W H Hudson
