Far from the Madding Crowd (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Reading this novel again in 36 degrees of heat in Tunisia was a delightful and slightly unusual experience! As I sat moderately baking in occasional shade, Bathsheba and Oak wrestled out their very pragmatic romance amidst the debris and lives of other characters whose impracticality and passion proves their undoing. The novel recommends survival through work and co-operation and this core value in the narrative far from being dull and tame compared to the heated, reckless drives of others,provides humour and finally healing. The scenes where Oak saves the gas ridden sheep and the stacks communicate Oak's consummate competence and care and Hardy 's sensory skills are marvellously suggestive and psychologically apt:

'He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek and turned.It was Bathsheba's breath - she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink.'

Far From The Madding Crowd is full of 'peeping tom' moments where characters watch each other through hedges,chinks and doors! This moment is beautifully laid out, the metaphor 'zephyr' registers the magic of Bathsheba's physicality...even more, her very breath, her life force enchants Oak. She is as special and magical to Oak as any legend from the Greeks. The simplicity of this shared watching explores their natural equality and the unconscious attraction of Bathsheba for Oak. How beautifully erotic is this scene and yet how it reveals their hesitancy and delay.

Hardy allows Bathsheba her eventual happiness which is rare indeed in the so-called 'great' novels, and he is also astute in granting Bathsheba autonomy in characterisation. She remains true to her perverse, challenging self and we do not see a shadowy, chastened figure at the end, though this Bathsheba has learnt about consequences!

' I have thought so much more of you since I fancied you did not want even to see me again.'

Human nature is perverse! This admission is fully in keeping Bathsheba's vanity and wilfulness. Yet is also reinforces the honesty and intimacy that has existed between them. Such intimacy elevates their relationship and makes their future marriage and happiness certain.

A final glimpse, simply because it is highly Impressionistic and tender and would not be out of keeping in a Katherine Mansfield story or a Monet painting:

'Ten minutes later, a large and smaller umbrella might have been seen moving from the same door, and through the mist along the road to the church.'

The tenderness of the ordinary here is palpable. Oak and Bathsheba are granted some privacy away from the speculative eye of reader and community and under their umbrelllas remains sanctuary and promise!

Wonderful!

Hardy's title is taken from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", and may have been meant ironically. Gray was comparing the quiet life of country dwellers with the frenzied crowds of the city:-

"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray",

yet Hardy is writing of rural characters whose wishes are often far from sober and to whom strife is by no means unknown.

This was Hardy's fourth novel and his first major success. It was also the first in which he used the name "Wessex", previously only used by historians in connection with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of that name, as a description of contemporary south-west England. Most of the action takes place in the village of Weatherbury in the county of South Wessex (for which read Puddletown, Dorset- Hardy's novels are generally set in real towns and villages disguised under fictitious names).

The plot centres upon a device which Hardy used in a number of his novels; two or more men in love with the same woman. (This theme also occurs, for example, in "A Pair of Blue Eyes", "Two on a Tower" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"). The heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, has inherited a farm from her uncle, which makes her independently wealthy and therefore a very desirable "catch". Bathsheba is a high-spirited young woman, proud of both her financial independence and her good looks, determined to farm her land herself without relying upon a bailiff, even though her inexperience and impulsiveness make this at times a difficult task.

Bathsheba's three suitors are given sharply contrasting characters. Sergeant Francis Troy is a handsome young soldier in the Dragoon Guards. He has plenty of charm, but is shallow, superficial and as impulsive as Bathsheba herself. His surname is taken from a Dorset village named Troy Town, but also has a symbolic significance in that it evokes the Trojan War which was set in motion by the reckless young seducer Paris. Bathsheba's own name recalls another unhappy love story, that of David and Bathsheba in the Old Testament.

Gabriel Oak is Troy's polar opposite. He works as a shepherd on Bathsheba's farm, but was an independent sheep-farmer before he was ruined financially by a tragic accident. His name also has an obvious symbolic meaning; his surname suggests solidity whereas his Christian name implies that he is a "guardian angel" to Bathsheba whom he loves from a distance. (He saves her from ruin on two occasions). He is steady and patient where Troy is dashing and reckless, and faithful in love where the sergeant is fickle.

The third suitor, William Boldwood, is another farmer. He is good-looking, wealthy and respectable, widely regarded as the most eligible man in the district, but Bathsheba rejects his proposal as she is determined to marry only for love, not for any material advantages the marriage might bring her. In some ways Boldwood and Oak are alike; both continue to love Bathsheba after an initial rejection, and they have more in common with each other than either has with Troy. Boldwood, however, can be seen as representing the "dark side" of Oak, as his disappointed love for the young woman turns into an obsessive jealousy verging on insanity. It is this obsession, combined with Troy's faithlessness, which leads to tragedy.

As one might expect in a novel with a rural setting and in which three of the main characters are farmers, agriculture plays a major part in the plot. Besides the main characters, there are also a crowd of rustic labourers with names like Joseph Poorgrass or Laban Tall, often used to provide comic relief or to comment on the main action. As always with Hardy, there are vivid passages describing the Dorset countryside in its many aspects. Yet this is not mere "beautiful writing" for its own sake. The story unfolds to the rhythm of the changing seasons- not just the seasons in the sense of spring, summer autumn and winter, but the seasons as the countryman would understand them- seedtime and harvest, haymaking, lambing and sheep-shearing, the hiring-fair in February and the grand agricultural fair in August.

At times the landscape seems to enter into the story as a character in its own right, as Hardy uses his descriptions of its changing moods for symbolic purposes, to reflect the changing fortunes of his characters. (He does something similar in many of his other novels, such as "Tess"). Two scenes in particular stand out. The first comes in the chapter "The Hollow amid the Ferns", when Troy seduces Bathsheba after a dazzling display of swordsmanship. (Given the strict codes of Victorian literary propriety, Hardy could not actually describe their physical lovemaking, but the swordplay itself is used to suggest it). This scene takes place outdoors, on a fine evening in early summer, and Hardy's descriptions of the burgeoning vegetation are used to symbolise the young couple's growing feelings of love and sexual desire. The second comes only two months later when Oak and Bathsheba are desperately trying to cover the corn-ricks ahead of a threatening storm. This passage contains some magnificent descriptive writing, used to convey not only the approach of the physical storm but also to suggest that there may be metaphorical storms ahead, threatening to destroy the happiness of Bathsheba and Troy who have recently married.

The novel was written in 1874, but it is clear that the events described take place some years before that date, possibly around 1850 or 1860. Whereas in "Tess", written in the 1890s, Hardy was describing a countryside in the throes of rapid social change and economic depression, the countryside of "Far from the Madding Crowd" is a more tranquil, timeless place. Although some of the protagonists meet with tragedy, the story has a more optimistic ending than many of Hardy's other novels. Whereas later novels such as "Tess" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" can be seen as tragedies, his equivalent of "Macbeth" or "Hamlet", "Far from the Madding Crowd" is closer in spirit to Shakespeare's late comedies. I was particularly reminded of "The Winter's Tale", another story of passion and drama against a rustic setting which ends serenely. This is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the English tradition.

Since studying his poetry for O level I had not read any Hardy, shying away from his novels because of their reputation for being depressing. While one leaves Far from the Madding Crowd with almost a chastened feeling, it is an undoubted masterpiece, full of wit, beauty and a deep understanding of fundamental human nature.

It is the story of the beautiful, black haired, Bathsheba Everdene (great name) and her three suitors. Returning to Wessex to take over her departed uncle's farm, she is long desired by solid competent but empoverished sheep farmer Gabriel Oak, ensnares yeoman farmer Boldwood through an act of thoughtless foolishness, and is herself swept away by the shallow but charming Sergeat Troy. Her complex relationships are played out in front of a backing cast of good old English rude mechanicals, Billy Smallbury, Jan Coggan, Joseph Poorgrass and others.

Bathsheba herself is a bewitching character, a sensual headstrong elemental force whose charisma enchants all around her, but it is the three men who are the real heart of the novel. Through them Hardy gives us three different but convincing pictures of men in the throws of love. Gabriel Oak is the solid dependable, utterly faithful but clumsy lover, unable to find the way to his beloved's heart. Gabriels stoic devotion is at times heartbreaking. Boldwood is the confirmed bachelor, the man's man who suffers massive and unbalancing upheaval when Bathsheba mistakenly shakes him out of his solitary existence. This is a portrait of love awakening in a middle aged man and the foolishness to which it drives him. Troy is a more conventional beguiling but caddish lover, but this is no two dimensional moustache twirling-villain. His is a character which owes its lineage back to George Wickham, but Hardy gives him more depth , more realism. This is a portrait of a charming but weak man, a man of the heart and loins rather than the head.

The wit of the novel is apparent right from the start, when we meet Gabriel Oak on the first page. Hardy, with his tongue gently in his cheek gives a vivid picture of an amiable, loveable, clumsy but ultimately solid man. The beauty comes from the descriptions of nature and the people within it. There is no better example than a stunning description of the night sky which comes early in the novel. "A difference of colour in the stars - oftener read than seen in England- was really perceptible here. The kingly brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Beutlegeuse shone with a fiery red".

The book is not one to skim through, Hardy's style requires and deserves careful reading, but at the end it is a deeply satisfying novel. Given the overall excellence, one can even forgive Hardy the slightly melodramatic climax of the intertwined fates of Oak, Boldwood and Troy.

Will I now read any more Hardy? Yes, I will, he is far far too good not to, but I'll need a bit of a rest first. I am given to understand that this is one of his less tragic novels, and yes there is happiness at the end, but in getting there the story is in places deeply harrowing.

Its a genuine classic, so it can't be anything other than highly recommended.