Guest review: Julia Jarman rediscovers Thomas Hardy, in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

"Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years ... "

Julia Jarman, a regular contributor to Writers Review, has been writing children’s books for forty years, and still is. Recently, though, she turned her hand to ‘golden years’ women’s fiction and The Widows' Wine Club was the happy result, followed by Widows on the Wine Path and Windows Waive the Rules; she is currently at work on the fourth title.

My off-on relationship with Thomas Hardy has lasted a long time. I was underwhelmed by Under the Greenwood Tree when I read it at school, and by The Trumpet Major, though I liked that, or rather the eponymous hero, a bit more. Miss Lemmon was keen on Hardy, and even keener on Jane Austen, but I didn’t like Jane either. My early-teenage self scorned Pride and Prejudice as trivial and much preferred an author called Frank G Slaughter who wrote hospital romances, with handsome surgeons wielding knives, and from whom I learned about full frontal lobotomies. (Which led to my appreciation of the joke, if joke it is, that I would rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. Thank you, Frank.)

I came to adore Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. They both appealed to my more mature teenage self who was outraged by injustice and loved a good cry. This lasted into my twenties and Tess and Jude are still on my bookshelf – or so I thought till I checked. They weren’t, but Under the Greenwood Tree, The Trumpet Major – filched from school! - The Woodlanders and Far From the Madding Crowd were. I began to question my memory and when I thumbed the pages of The Trumpet Major and saw that the name of the hero was John Loveday I started to think that Thomas Hardy had had a bigger influence on me than I have given him credit for, and that I liked him a lot more than I remembered. I have used the name Loveday for one of my own male heroes!

I do know I’ve changed a lot over the years. Somewhere along the line I joined the mass of humanity who cannot bear too much reality, and prefer to laugh rather than cry. I do not need to be reminded of all the injustice in the world, is my excuse. I want to escape from it in the pages of a book. Call me shallow if you like, but though I prefer realism to fantasy, I like a bit of uplift with it, and Hardy doesn’t deliver.

Was I unduly influenced by the critic, F R Leavis, popular in my youth, who declared Hardy second-rate? He didn’t include him in the select group of writers he thought to be in ‘the great tradition’ of the British novel, thinking the hand of Fate too heavy in his melodramatic plots. I share the view that the more satisfying novels have plot arising from character, and I remembered the hand of destiny being much too evident in Hardy. Maybe that’s why I felt justified not-reading him and we lost touch.

Till recently.

Fortunately my friend, Celia Rees, re-introduced us, and reminded me, even before the Loveday discovery, that he has never been as far away as I thought. It came about when Celia read my work in progress, The Widows’ Wine and Book Club, fourth in my Widows series, and, referring to a certain incident, she said, ‘That’s straight out of Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd to be precise.’

OMG! I had to re-read it on Kindle – I was away from home - to see if I had committed a dastardly act of plagiarism or a commendable act of post-modern intertextuality. Re-read it, note, though at that moment I couldn’t remember ever reading it. In my own defence my first read was over fifty years ago. When I got home I found my copy, a 1968 Pan edition with a photo of Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, on the cover. Inside, on the first page, was Gabriel Oak with whom I instantly fell in love, or re-fell, like the twenty-something me who first read it, and I kept reading. It was nothing like I remembered – or didn’t remember – but I must have absorbed it and I hope learned a thing or two.

What a story!

Hardy plunges straight in. No long preamble. We meet the hero and then the heroine – he’s watching her sitting on top of an overloaded cart - and the story starts to unfold. He writes vividly. He shows us that in small country places, far from the madding crowds, passions fly high in ‘ordinary’ people, that ordinary people are extraordinary. The descriptions of the Dorset countryside are done with more economy than I misremembered, enhancing the story not overwhelming it. I saw no sign of the heavy hand of Fate. Everything arises from character in this novel, and he creates brilliant characters. Bathsheba is a wonderfully realistic heroine, passionate, impulsive, vain, competent, and in a crucial incident, that incident, she is careless of another person’s feelings and so heedless of the consequences, that I expected tragedy, which there is for some. Gabriel Oak is a convincing thoroughly decent man, a thoroughly human man with faults and virtues, who rises to heroism. Farmer Boldwood is another thoroughly decent man, tragically lacking in insight, and Sergeant Troy is an all too believable s***, an attractive s*** to some, but not me.

Sorry, but spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know. I’ll write it tiny to help you, but it isn’t a tragedy, there’s a happy ending, a happy ending from Hardy. I loved it and highly recommend! Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years. So kiss me, Hardy! Thank you!

Far from the Madding Crowd is published by Vintage Classics.

ON WRITING by Stephen King, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"He comes over as assured but not conceited, generous with his encouragement, genuine in his desire to pass on the joy he finds in writing."

This post first appeared on Linda's website blog. 

I have to confess that I've yet to read a complete Stephen King novel. Trusted friends have recommended CARRIE, MISERY and others, and after being so impressed by ON WRITING, which I first read a few years ago, I did try MISERY. But ... no. I read only two or three chapters before concluding that Stephen King's fiction just isn't for me. It was gripping, undoubtedly, but perhaps I'm just too much of a wuss for such meaty stuff (and also vegetarian).

This, though, I highly recommend. It's part memoir, framed by King's early days as solitary writer of stories, contributor to a school magazine and journalist - always with a hunger for writing, and tireless energy - and, at the other end of the book, an account of the traumatic accident which he was lucky to survive (he was hit by a truck driver while walking alone on a country road) and his slow recovery, during which resuming the writing of this book was a significant stage.

There is so much to like here, not least Stephen King's devotion to his wife Tabitha (also a writer) and his gratitude for her support throughout his career, especially after the accident. His sales number hundreds of millions, he has published more than 50 novels, won a barrowload of prestigious awards and his current novel END OF WATCH is a New York Times bestseller; yet here he comes over as assured but not conceited, generous with his encouragement, genuine in his desire to pass on the joy he finds in writing.

I've always disliked the nuts-and-bolts approach to writing which suggests that if you follow the rules and work hard you'll end up with a publishable novel. Although King does look at aspects of style and technique, he is clear that writing well is more than that. "At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style ... but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic." Yet he's good at debunking ivory tower notions of writerly preciousness, stressing that the most important thing is simply to get on with it. "There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station." (In a footnote, King explains "Traditionally, the muses were women, but mine's a guy; I'm afraid we'll just have to live with that.") Like many writers, he finds his 'muse' mainly by turning up for work and putting in the hours.

He stresses the need for truth in what you write, dismissing a cynical market-based approach which puts sales and profit ahead of honesty. "It's morally wonky, for one thing - the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck. Also, brothers and sisters, it doesn't work." In terms of his own love of the horror genre, "If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have," fed by his early love of horror movies and comics. Interestingly, King is a writer of suspense thrillers who does not give foremost importance to plot: "I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story."

This isn't a writing textbook and there are no exercises, but there are plenty of examples (good and bad), a section of text which is then revised, with explanations, and one exhilarating what-if masterclass in which King takes a simple, familiar situation as the basis for a story and then plays with expanding it in ways that tighten the tension. It seems that his prodigious output since the publication of Carrie, his first novel, in 1974, has done nothing to dull his enjoyment in writing and creativity. "In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

Reading this book for a second time, I like Stephen King every bit as much as I did on my first reading. So: should I give his fiction another try? What would you recommend?

This account of The Dead Zone, published in 1979, has a particular, prescient resonance now. King says that his initial idea "called for a dangerously unstable politician ... a fellow who could climb the political ladder by showing the world a jolly, jes'-folks face and charming the voters by refusing to play the game in the usual way." Thinking about his other narrator, King wonders: "Can a political assassin ever be right? And if he is, could you make him the protagonist of the novel? The good guy?"

I might have to read The Dead Zone to find out how it's resolved...