Customer Reviews

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved the book! It is not for the faint of heart as it takes a little more time to read....the old English. The story is classic.

Book came in speedy fashion but was not the edition advertised. I had to purchase another.

Hardy was a naturalist in whose novels everything goes wrong. Michael Henchard is a drunk who "sells" his wife Susan and infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor. Susan doesn't realize the sale is bogus because she is "simple," throws her ring away, and leaves with the sailor. When he sobers up next day, Henchard searches all over for his lost family, and finally enters a church and swears an oath over an enormous bible that he will not drink from his current age of 21 to double that age. Meanwhile, and 18 years later, when the sailor dies, Susan, with Elizabeth, comes looking for Henchard at Casterbridge. He is now a corn merchant and mayor of the town. As a teetotaler, he is described as drinking glass after glass of water at table for a town hearing. Eventually Susan, via Elizabeth-Jane, contacts Henchard and he pens a note suggesting that they meet at the "Ring." This last turns out to be a ruined Roman amphitheater or coliseum, a 1500-year-old relic full of ghosts and whose very name symbolizes the dark past. Henchard and Susan agree to remarry, playacting a courtship for public appearances, and to keep the daughter in ignorance that the sailor was not her biological father. After they marry, Henchard and the manager of his business, Farfrae, have a falling out because the latter shows the former up and makes a fool of him, making himself more popular than the mayor. To make matters worse, Elizabeth-Jane falls in love with Farfrae.

Frankly, that's as far as I've gotten. I know how it ends for Henchard, but I won't spoil the ending. Hardy is a mean naturalist writer, and has no sympathy for his characters whatsoever. _Casterbridge_ was first published in 1886, when alcoholism was little understood - least of all by people like Hardy who didn't have the disease. It's all too easy for this author to condemn and be judgmental of alcoholic people. I would suggest for an alternative reading Eugene O'Neill's _The Iceman Cometh_, since O'Neill was himself an alcoholic and could rightfully speak for alcoholics. The subject, no matter in whose hands, is by nature depressing. All my editorializing aside, Thomas Hardy is a great novelist who has earned his place in the canon. His poetry is good, too. _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ is worth pursuing to the end if you're not an alcoholic.