"Far From the Madding Crowd"
Nov. 9th, 2008 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losThe Madding Crowd’s most powerful scenes come from the conveyance of Fanny’s coffin home to Bathsheba directing Gabriel Oak to see to the gargoyle-drainpipe in the churchyard. Following a long ho-hum stretch this was devastatingly good: everything I've ever liked about Hardy in a glut of great.
The rise and fall of Sergeant ‘Utter Bastard’ Troy is a believable, seductive process. Our Heroine Bathsheba has an unwholesomely sexy fencing scene with this cad soldier character and, even knowing he's a vast dick, I can't fault her for kind of wanting to do him. I mean, his sword dance way strong. Though by the end he’s such a vast asshat that his fate earns a felt ‘oh good, finally.’
Hardy is still /really/ funny in a sort of Dickens way. Plus omg, the characterization, the details, the History-Boys-style moments of epiphany/connection, the cute bit with the baby lambs (but not the part where they make an abandoned baby lamb ‘take’ by wrapping it in the skin of a mother sheep’s dead baby—thanks for than, English agriculturalists/Hardy)--I love him so. I'd forgotten how much.
The aforementioned stretch is whelming and perfect—what Joyce tries for with ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners and never quite achieves for me. Fanny’s death is a genuine shock: but we walked with her! We followed that dog! And then the rain on the coffin is so brilliant that you can smell the wet trees, and Bathsheba in the room deciding to open the coffin has a grim, horrible inevitability, and perspective is so well used as to make selfish feeling and action entirely understandable and sympathetic. Even Troy’s flailing, mawkish regret and steps to correct it are all so perfect, and Bathsheba’s mingled sympathy and resentment are as exquisitely conveyed as the aforementioned sensual detail. All through this part of the novel, as with Gabriel in the lightening storm, thatching the stacks with Bathsheba earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d film this. The writing is emphatically cinematic, lush and sentimental but loosing no strength for it.
Hardy’s always very careful about giving you an exact idea of the quality of light, frequently by referencing relevant painters for their color palates and saturation levels, etc., which is like any cultural reference: enormously useful if you’re in the know and irritatingly opaque if you’re not. All the light through trees here made me think of Sophia Coppola, but /stronger./
It’s a /fun/ novel as well as an occasionally heartbreaking one. The extras are characterized with that decisive, immediate ease Hardy’s a master of. A seemingly careless line and you have them entirely. A conversation and you’re as fond of them as any old acquaintance.
Were I Hardy, I would have indulged in a brief cameo from one of the Mayor team on one of the occasions the characters entered Casterbridge. I believe the novels are relatively contrmporaneous, and what’s the fun of having your own pocket environment if the denizens don’t occasionally wander into each other’s lives? That’s two authors I really like (Hardy and Faulkner) with pocket slightly-unreal versions of familiar surroundings, rendered into complete environments. Neat trick to try out.
If you’ve read Hardy before, you know that, for all his deftness, there’s a miserable bit of him that wants to be M. Night Shyamalan. “But of course you knew… THAT I SLEPT WITH ARABELLA AGAIN!!1” What, Jude? No, no, why the fuck would we /know/ that, that’s not a twist, it’s just poorly foreshadowed! “And naturally you knew… THAT HE RAPED ME AND I WAS TOTALLY PREGGERZ!1!” /Sigh./ No, Tess, I did not know that. You really might have mentioned before we got here, baptizing this stillborn baby. But this time Hardy does his ‘What a Twist!’ and…no, it’s not. It’s what we could have guessed from the information given. It’s fine. Well done, Hardy, that /is/ suspense, rather than 19th century!The Happening. Which I will never forgive the people who made me go to it for inflicting on me. Amy.
So this free public domain book on tape is read by a variety or people, and beggers can't be choosers, etc. But I could not be reconciled to this weird cockney Australian woman’s voice. It was nigh incomprehensible, and she kept .saying words /wrong/--not just /accent/ wrong, like AUGH NO HIS NAME IS GAY-BREE-EL, NOT GAH-BREE-EL, HE'S A BOOOY AND THIS ISN’T XENA. The name's only been around a few thousand years in common usage.
Only like, a few chapters out of the book are /her/, and the book itself is sufficiently charming, but while good, at some point it became really entirely tiresome in its length and its switching between like 9 readers (I know it was free, but damn, just /commit/ to it, like, any 3 of you). Also, I think Hardy suffers from a change of medium. I love him when I can pick him up, put him down, take a break, make cocoa, go watch something, linger over him for a week or even two...not so much when I'm being asked to listen to him go into excruciatingly beautiful detail about nature for any 15 given hours at a stretch, via increasingly odd-voiced narrators making... personal choices about whether or not to do character voices, etc. It's just exhausting, to have to /clip/ through, and he's better on the page when I can think about it than droning in my ear.
Aaaand then some kid from Illinois thought is was necessary to read his chapter with Irish accents. And this Southern guy, bless him, really Could Not Read three sentences together without fucking up, it was like watching Bush try to talk. Aaand I thought I’d take another Britlit break after this or something b/c man, exhausting, but a brief BFA flirt later I was back in the cold, unloving arms of Brideshead Revisited, so clearly that was a resolution of dubious merit.
Also, Madding Crowd had a happy ending. Well, okay, someone got shot in the chest and someone else went mad, but the couple we'd shipped all along (Gabriel Oak/Bathsheba Everdene) finally got it together: this is /not/ the Hardy way: she should have been hung, or gone mad with grief and turned to religious fanaticism, or died poor, dishonored and alone. This is how Hardy rolls—like a skimmity ride. Was he sick that day or something and just went 'Oh fuck it, behind on deadline, will never finish NaNo now! Aaaand, they got married at long fucking last and the end, okay, there'?
For all my opinion of Bathsheba fluctuated, she was a believable female character in that way Hardy, seemingly prescient, writes with respect and interiority. Occasional ‘oh, women are /like/ that’ remarks can’t blunt the force of Bathsheba’s evident personhood. I love Oak best (better even than poor, creepy Boldwood with his ‘Bathsheba Boldwood’ secret dress trove), and I want them happy, and for once a Hardy heroine isn’t, by the end, reluctantly accepting sex as the burden necessary to take upon herself to content the man she loves. I’m looking at you, Mrs. The Obscure (no, not you Arabella, sit back down, we all know you love the sex). I still want Bathsheba to fully recover her laughter and her self-confidence after the tragedy, but there’s not ever a condemnation of her willful self-command, only of the accident that resulted in Boldwood’s fascination and the lapse of that strength which led to her marriage to Troy.
I think the novel leaves plenty of room for her to ascend back to interior strength even as Oak rises to exterior strength greater even than that he first lost over the course of the novel. Bathsheba too can negotiate a new strong self-image, as someone who for the first time is acting on positive desire based on respect rather than infatuation, someone who’s strength comes from having survived trials. Hardy’s description of her powers upon Troy’s death shows her mettle, and that, while it can be temporarily suppressed, can’t be extinguished. I would have liked a bit more mental detail on the process of her finally falling in proper love with Oak, but as Hardy can’t seem to quite conceive of a healthy female love surpassing a sisterly affection, and finds female passion somehow corrosive to their strength, the evasive arrival at the fact of her love that we get is probably the best that can have been expected.
In addition to his luxuriant, stunning hand with natural description, Hardy has a way of seamlessly integrating the small lives of the agrarian proletariat with literary allusion, not endowing them with significance—they already /had/ their own scope and tragedy—but holding up their struggles to be examined as equally worthy of consideration and empathy. It’s a very interesting experience to read him as a privileged American college girl and then to re-encounter him as a farmhand who works dawn to dusk six days a week. Not that my situation is comparable to that of those poorly off in the period he’s writing about: by sheer virtue of the possibility of recourse to my family’s money, I’m spared almost all of their mental and practical durm and strang. But I guess I feel I can more accurately empathize with characters so frequently concerned about the weather, their crops, etc., now that I have some slim sympathetic notion of the work they’re engaged in.
Looking forward to finishing off Hardy: the major ones I had yet to read were Far From The Madding Crowd and Return of the Native, so I hope to hit up Return eventually, when I’ve recovered my wind.
The rise and fall of Sergeant ‘Utter Bastard’ Troy is a believable, seductive process. Our Heroine Bathsheba has an unwholesomely sexy fencing scene with this cad soldier character and, even knowing he's a vast dick, I can't fault her for kind of wanting to do him. I mean, his sword dance way strong. Though by the end he’s such a vast asshat that his fate earns a felt ‘oh good, finally.’
Hardy is still /really/ funny in a sort of Dickens way. Plus omg, the characterization, the details, the History-Boys-style moments of epiphany/connection, the cute bit with the baby lambs (but not the part where they make an abandoned baby lamb ‘take’ by wrapping it in the skin of a mother sheep’s dead baby—thanks for than, English agriculturalists/Hardy)--I love him so. I'd forgotten how much.
The aforementioned stretch is whelming and perfect—what Joyce tries for with ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners and never quite achieves for me. Fanny’s death is a genuine shock: but we walked with her! We followed that dog! And then the rain on the coffin is so brilliant that you can smell the wet trees, and Bathsheba in the room deciding to open the coffin has a grim, horrible inevitability, and perspective is so well used as to make selfish feeling and action entirely understandable and sympathetic. Even Troy’s flailing, mawkish regret and steps to correct it are all so perfect, and Bathsheba’s mingled sympathy and resentment are as exquisitely conveyed as the aforementioned sensual detail. All through this part of the novel, as with Gabriel in the lightening storm, thatching the stacks with Bathsheba earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d film this. The writing is emphatically cinematic, lush and sentimental but loosing no strength for it.
Hardy’s always very careful about giving you an exact idea of the quality of light, frequently by referencing relevant painters for their color palates and saturation levels, etc., which is like any cultural reference: enormously useful if you’re in the know and irritatingly opaque if you’re not. All the light through trees here made me think of Sophia Coppola, but /stronger./
It’s a /fun/ novel as well as an occasionally heartbreaking one. The extras are characterized with that decisive, immediate ease Hardy’s a master of. A seemingly careless line and you have them entirely. A conversation and you’re as fond of them as any old acquaintance.
Were I Hardy, I would have indulged in a brief cameo from one of the Mayor team on one of the occasions the characters entered Casterbridge. I believe the novels are relatively contrmporaneous, and what’s the fun of having your own pocket environment if the denizens don’t occasionally wander into each other’s lives? That’s two authors I really like (Hardy and Faulkner) with pocket slightly-unreal versions of familiar surroundings, rendered into complete environments. Neat trick to try out.
If you’ve read Hardy before, you know that, for all his deftness, there’s a miserable bit of him that wants to be M. Night Shyamalan. “But of course you knew… THAT I SLEPT WITH ARABELLA AGAIN!!1” What, Jude? No, no, why the fuck would we /know/ that, that’s not a twist, it’s just poorly foreshadowed! “And naturally you knew… THAT HE RAPED ME AND I WAS TOTALLY PREGGERZ!1!” /Sigh./ No, Tess, I did not know that. You really might have mentioned before we got here, baptizing this stillborn baby. But this time Hardy does his ‘What a Twist!’ and…no, it’s not. It’s what we could have guessed from the information given. It’s fine. Well done, Hardy, that /is/ suspense, rather than 19th century!The Happening. Which I will never forgive the people who made me go to it for inflicting on me. Amy.
So this free public domain book on tape is read by a variety or people, and beggers can't be choosers, etc. But I could not be reconciled to this weird cockney Australian woman’s voice. It was nigh incomprehensible, and she kept .saying words /wrong/--not just /accent/ wrong, like AUGH NO HIS NAME IS GAY-BREE-EL, NOT GAH-BREE-EL, HE'S A BOOOY AND THIS ISN’T XENA. The name's only been around a few thousand years in common usage.
Only like, a few chapters out of the book are /her/, and the book itself is sufficiently charming, but while good, at some point it became really entirely tiresome in its length and its switching between like 9 readers (I know it was free, but damn, just /commit/ to it, like, any 3 of you). Also, I think Hardy suffers from a change of medium. I love him when I can pick him up, put him down, take a break, make cocoa, go watch something, linger over him for a week or even two...not so much when I'm being asked to listen to him go into excruciatingly beautiful detail about nature for any 15 given hours at a stretch, via increasingly odd-voiced narrators making... personal choices about whether or not to do character voices, etc. It's just exhausting, to have to /clip/ through, and he's better on the page when I can think about it than droning in my ear.
Aaaand then some kid from Illinois thought is was necessary to read his chapter with Irish accents. And this Southern guy, bless him, really Could Not Read three sentences together without fucking up, it was like watching Bush try to talk. Aaand I thought I’d take another Britlit break after this or something b/c man, exhausting, but a brief BFA flirt later I was back in the cold, unloving arms of Brideshead Revisited, so clearly that was a resolution of dubious merit.
Also, Madding Crowd had a happy ending. Well, okay, someone got shot in the chest and someone else went mad, but the couple we'd shipped all along (Gabriel Oak/Bathsheba Everdene) finally got it together: this is /not/ the Hardy way: she should have been hung, or gone mad with grief and turned to religious fanaticism, or died poor, dishonored and alone. This is how Hardy rolls—like a skimmity ride. Was he sick that day or something and just went 'Oh fuck it, behind on deadline, will never finish NaNo now! Aaaand, they got married at long fucking last and the end, okay, there'?
For all my opinion of Bathsheba fluctuated, she was a believable female character in that way Hardy, seemingly prescient, writes with respect and interiority. Occasional ‘oh, women are /like/ that’ remarks can’t blunt the force of Bathsheba’s evident personhood. I love Oak best (better even than poor, creepy Boldwood with his ‘Bathsheba Boldwood’ secret dress trove), and I want them happy, and for once a Hardy heroine isn’t, by the end, reluctantly accepting sex as the burden necessary to take upon herself to content the man she loves. I’m looking at you, Mrs. The Obscure (no, not you Arabella, sit back down, we all know you love the sex). I still want Bathsheba to fully recover her laughter and her self-confidence after the tragedy, but there’s not ever a condemnation of her willful self-command, only of the accident that resulted in Boldwood’s fascination and the lapse of that strength which led to her marriage to Troy.
I think the novel leaves plenty of room for her to ascend back to interior strength even as Oak rises to exterior strength greater even than that he first lost over the course of the novel. Bathsheba too can negotiate a new strong self-image, as someone who for the first time is acting on positive desire based on respect rather than infatuation, someone who’s strength comes from having survived trials. Hardy’s description of her powers upon Troy’s death shows her mettle, and that, while it can be temporarily suppressed, can’t be extinguished. I would have liked a bit more mental detail on the process of her finally falling in proper love with Oak, but as Hardy can’t seem to quite conceive of a healthy female love surpassing a sisterly affection, and finds female passion somehow corrosive to their strength, the evasive arrival at the fact of her love that we get is probably the best that can have been expected.
In addition to his luxuriant, stunning hand with natural description, Hardy has a way of seamlessly integrating the small lives of the agrarian proletariat with literary allusion, not endowing them with significance—they already /had/ their own scope and tragedy—but holding up their struggles to be examined as equally worthy of consideration and empathy. It’s a very interesting experience to read him as a privileged American college girl and then to re-encounter him as a farmhand who works dawn to dusk six days a week. Not that my situation is comparable to that of those poorly off in the period he’s writing about: by sheer virtue of the possibility of recourse to my family’s money, I’m spared almost all of their mental and practical durm and strang. But I guess I feel I can more accurately empathize with characters so frequently concerned about the weather, their crops, etc., now that I have some slim sympathetic notion of the work they’re engaged in.
Looking forward to finishing off Hardy: the major ones I had yet to read were Far From The Madding Crowd and Return of the Native, so I hope to hit up Return eventually, when I’ve recovered my wind.
