Difficult to believe it's Hardy...

I have been wallowing in Thomas Hardy of late, luxuriating in his wonderful evocation of agricultural life in ‘Wessex’ at the beginning of the Victorian era. To my canon of Hardy favourites has been recently added, care of Audible, ‘Two on a Tower’; a real find. But ‘Desperate Remedies’, an early Hardy offering, will not appear on my re-read list.

It is quite difficult to know what to make of this book. Had I not known who the author was, I would have been hard-pressed ever to have guessed that it was Thomas Hardy. Admittedly there are a few of his trademarks: his use of the dialect word ‘tranter’ to describe a carter, mention of apple-pressing to make cider, and the occasional interludes of labouring men discoursing in amusing dialect. But there the similarity ends.

Spoiler Alert! In the following review, it has been impossible to construct a meaningful critique without extensive reference to the story. Where to start? The plot is neither fish nor fowl: Jayne Eyre meets The Woman in White, crashing into frequent non-credible Dickensian coincidences on the way. And even before the end of volume one of this three-volume novel, I was sick to death of the sound of the heroine’s name—Cytheria. There was the odd moment of tender dialogue—between the heroine and her thwarted lover Edward Springrove after she has married the villain Manston. This she does, while loving Edward, encouraged by her mercenary brother in order that both of them should be able to enjoy a comfortable life, a decision at variance with her declared love of Springrove although she thinks he is engaged to another. There are some moments of tension: will she and the villain, whose first wife it has just been discovered did not die in a fire, consummate their marriage before they can be found? Will Manston be able to cover his tracks and avoid detection? His crime is finally uncovered in the most unlikely and melodramatic way.

The style is ‘clunky’; it is as though several writers of different genres had contributed chapters. The plot twists and turns—languorous meanders would be a better epithet—are revealed in the most pedestrian fashion. The motives of the ‘mysterious’ Miss Aldclyff in engineering Cytharia’s marriage to Manston are revealed right at the end, to no-one’s great surprise, to be because he is her illegitimate son.

In my view, this early Hardy novel—his second—written in 1871, was, as the Spectator review said of it at the time: ‘a desperate remedy for an emaciated purse’; a pastiche of popular styles and themes, spiced up with some illicit relationships, produced for the sole purpose of making money. I still struggle to believe it came from the same pen as ‘The Mayor’, The Woodlanders, and Far from the Madding Crowd. Since I have no intention of listening to it again, I have returned the book to Audible.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!