BOOK REVIEW - FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD BY THOMAS HARDY

Book Review          Far from the Madding Crowd

Author                    Thomas Hardy

Afterword               Ian Ousby

Engravings             Agnes Miller Parker

Publisher                The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, London 

It feels good to have a pristine book in the hand; one that doesn't even feel it's been read! We inherited it and it is beautiful. 

Thomas Hardy, I have heard, uses words in excess of what is required. I have gone along with this, with reservations, and then I opened this book. I read a mix of literature but it is a long time since I have read a ‘classic’. 

It's been included in a local book club year list and it was in the house. I Iike words and the way they move along the line. I wanted to read it for what it is. There is much beauty in everything that Hardy writes. He paints an actual picture for the reader and thinking about his descriptions of the time he was writing he makes the rural life so visual for us. I could empathise with so much throughout the chapters. I loved it and the words we don't hear much of today. 

Enough of the literature. There is reality in this story. The emphasis in the hard rural life with little comfort and the vagaries of surviving. Then the sharp contrast with class; people of standing and the others who are forced to accept servitude. It is also a love story that moves in and around the characters.

By getting away from the frenzy of the city he wanted to go far from the ‘madding crowd’ and created a compelling rural novel in doing so. 

The Afterword by Ian Ousby, of seven pages, is interesting and should be read. The engravings added to the atmosphere of the book. 

What next? We have Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Josephine Tey’s, The Man in the Queue. There is much to enjoy.