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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Possibly the best ever book about nature.,
This review is from: Woodlanders Thomas Hardy (Everyman's Library (Paper)) (Paperback)
Hardy is my favourite poet, but I've always found the novels hard-going, too determinedly grim, too schematically fatalistic. For the first third of this novel, I felt the samme way, dutifully admiring the prose, but not really enjoying. Then I left it for a few months, read Proust, and came back to it. I started kicking myself.It's a masterpiece, an absolute joy for two reasons. Not the characters, who rarely rise above their stock roles - the decent, honourable heroine impossibly torn between passion and propriety; the manly, back-to-nature hero, who could come straight from COLD COMFORT FARM); the impoverished aristocratic cad; his wealthy lover, the promiscuous bored ex-actress golddigger; the bumbling middle-class trader of lowly origins. What astonishes first is Hardy's plot, related by a weirdly troubling narrator, awesomely intricate in itself, but full of an almost Nabokovian sadism. Situations, desires, hopes are set up and cruelly dashed as the beautiful narrative machinations begin cranking - the man-trap scene had me literally sweating. This irony, however, also has an emotional effect, as it reveals characters trapped by the social, gender and psychological limits the plot symbolises, and forces them into a humanity beyond their stereotype. Mostly, though, this is a novel written by a poet, and in its animation of the sexually charged woods, the lanes, glades, fields, sunsets, dawns, storms, drizzles, winds, breezes, nature is the book's true hero, full of almost supernatural agency. Hardy's gifts of description, his unearthing the unearthly, the uncanny, the inexplicable beneath the surface, are unsurpassed in Victorian fiction; while his non-didactic anger at social injustice is so much more compelling than the more literal Dickens'.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfectly lovely,
By
This review is from: The Woodlanders (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)
This is one of my favourite Hardy novels. As some others have noted, it's not one of the "big 5" but certainly worth reading. Hardy's descriptions of the woodlands are beautiful, and I found the ending to be one of his most unpredictable. I wouldn't recommend reading it if you are feeling down, as the ending is sooooo wonderfully tragic (hehe), or if you're not a fan of Hardy's prose style, but otherwise it's a wonderful read. Very personal as well. I got the feeling it was written just for me :)
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lesser known gem of English literature,
By Charles Ryder (Tokyo) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Woodlanders (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
It's easy to see how Thomas Hardy became a wonderful poet after his long career of writing novels, given the meaty prose and superb scenery he conjured in "The Woodlanders." Tales of matrimonial and unrequited love compete for space amongst the bounty of Hardy's described woods, heaths and vales. "Woodlanders" offers some of the most complex and well-developed characters of Hardy's novelistic pantheon. Yet such stories of amor et fides, honor and self-sacrifice quickly become a backdrop when Hardy reaches for the woods of his mind.
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