By Thomas Hardy
Penguin, NZ$16 | Reviewed by David Levinson

Hardy is self-medication for those who measure heartbreak by the shot glass: By the time Far From the Madding Crowd draws to a halt, its characters are so internally shredded that you get the impression they’ve aged a lifetime within its several-year span.

Yet what elevates this from rustic lonely-hearts-club to masterpiece is just how thorough Hardy’s cartography of love proves to be: Ever-sensitive to the duality of rejection, he shifts perceptions of characters like well-oiled tectonic plates, as they reluctantly grind each other down to nothing. All that manages to survive the maelstrom of unchecked libidos is the durability of a mistress for her worker, the latter, Gabriel Oak, playing the proto-helper-guy to her, Bathsheba’s, steely, Hawksian composure. Following Gabriel’s early rejection at Bathsheba’s hands, he falls like sediment, becoming a narrative lining atop which two other shades of masculinity vie for her affection. Their eventual failure manages to invert the helium-induced peacocking of the screwball: In a world where every gesture is met with the whiplash of its consequence, and the tongue is fastened to whim, Gabriel wins out by learning to keep his mouth shut. Nevertheless, cockblock’s a cockblock to these eyes (more so when it’s twice over), and no matter how sincerely Hardy tries to imbue his lead guy with a kind of a hangdog dignity, he always comes across as less than the sum of his parts. There is the possibility that the marriage with Bathsheba only arises because she’s been destroyed, brought down to his level (“for she never laughed readily now”), but then again that could just be the talk of someone who’s happiest when peering at life through the bottom of a glass.