Review: The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this years ago and remember loving it, but I’ve gotten it tangled in my memory with The Mayor of Casterbridge. How I could have forgotten Eustacia Vye I don’t know, but it speaks to how stupid I was as a young man.

This is not Tess. But that’s OK since, as I see it, nothing is Tess, which is, for me, the finest British novel of the 19th century. Instead, this is an inspired look at thwarted passion. It may not be Hardy at his very best, but even second-level Hardy is towering. I got the chance last month to pay respect to him at Westminster Abbey, and it’s good to have him speaking back to me now through this great work.

If you want to pick at this, you could acknowledge that some of the literary seams show. There are a couple contrived moments that keep this from the excellence of Tess – in particular the coincidences that have characters just missing chances to explain misunderstandings. Eustacia just misses a letter that would clarify things with Clem; Mrs. Yeobright arrives with her peace offering at the one moment that might compromise Eustacia; Diggory has a capacity for winning at cards when he must. Still, the effect of those contrivances is not contrived.

These are characters in a beautiful but barren landscape who suspect there are grand possibilities in life but cannot quite see them from the heights around them. Clem is noble, with a vision of improving the education of the unfortunate around him. He’s naïve, but I certainly forgive him. He’s read books as a young man, and he’s found it’s likely he can make his fortune. He wants more; he wants to bring the best of the outside world to the heath.

Damon is a shyster. He’s taken all he can from the Wessex he knows, and, once he gets his inheritance, he decides he’d rather feed on the opportunities of a bigger city.

Diggory is weird, but he’s a marvel, too. In his redness, he represents both the soil around them and the potential for that soil to hold spirits greater than the forces of Modernity that draw the other characters.

Tamsin is, well, a too sweet Victorian stereotype. I’d think of her as a flaw in the novel except that she works so well as a counterpoint to Eustacia.

And then there’s Eustacia. She’s worth the price of admission alone. She is passionate, not just for the ideas that grab Clem but for the physical world around her. She is as sexual a creature as I can imagine from this era. The opening scene of her lighting the largest and most enduring bonfire is just perfect. She burns brighter than others herself, and that means she’ll have to consume herself more quickly as well.

I love Hardy for his romanticism, but I love him more for the cynicism underneath it. This is a man who once wrote a poem about the Titanic in which he rooted for the iceberg. (“The Meeting of the Twain.”) He gives us characters who hope for more than they have, then he gives us a character who, in the intense physicality of her passion wants even more than that. Then he takes them away. If you stare into a fire and then look at the dark, it’s darker than it was before. That’s how it is with Eustacia. Once she’s extinguished, the romantic possibilities of the novel seem all the darker and less available.


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