The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [299]
When in the late 1960s a film version of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) launched Hardy's stories back into vogue, one explanation offered for this was that these colourful evocations of life in the English countryside before it was disrupted by all the disintegrative pressures of the modern world appealed to the late-twentieth century's almost insatiable appetite for nostalgia. But obviously the last thing that can be said about Hardy's books is that they convey any cosily nostalgic view of the past. On the contrary, there are few stories so bleak in the English language: a sense of gathering gloom and despair hangs over the sequence of novels like a cloud.
In general there are two features we may note in his major stories which give us a particular clue as to what is happening. The first is the way the world they describe is so sharply polarised. On the one hand there is the timeless, rooted world of the Dorset countryside in which Hardy himself had grown up. This is personified in the rustic characters who appear in the early novels like a comic chorus: the carol singers of Mellstock in Under the Greenwood Tree, the bucolic drinkers in the Weatherbury malthouse in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is reflected in Hardy's beautifully observed descriptions of nature: the flowers and insects of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native; the trees which whisper and rustle and sigh through almost every chapter of The Woodlanders. Above all this rooted natural world is summed up in those three almost interchangeable figures, Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd; Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native and Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders. Each of these rock-like characters, representing the timeless virtues of unselfish goodness and practical common sense, is cast in the role of looking on, shrewdly but sadly, while others in the story get carried away by self-deceiving fantasies, recklessly encompassing their own destruction.
At the other pole, intruding into this rooted world like a growing shadow, is the repeated appearance of a very different type of male figure: a predator on women, dark, heartless, promiscuous, without roots or moral centre, who inflicts misery and destruction on all those who fall under his spell: Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd; Damon Wildeve in The Return of the Native; Edred Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders; Alec D'Urberville in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Making up a third significant group in the novels are the tragic characters caught between these two poles: those who have gone out into the wider world, lost their centre and their roots, and then make doomed attempts to put them down again: Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native; Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge; Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders.
The other notable feature of Hardy's novels is the remarkable extent to which they are centred on their characters' hopeless search for the right partner: the `other half' who would make them whole. Tess, Jude, Giles Winterborne, Mayor Henchard, Grace Melbury, Eustacia Vye, Sue Bridehead, Farmer Boldwood: the list of Hardy characters who seek vainly for their true `other half' is almost endless. No other writer has ever been so obsessed with mismatches, with the hero or heroine whose life seems blighted through having been landed by a malevolent fate with the wrong woman or the wrong man. And in both these general features of the novels we can see, thanks not least to the illuminating biography by Robert Gittings, just how Hardy's stories reflected the unfolding of his own inner life: as a deeply melancholy, insecure man who for