The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge (1885)
Here's what happens: Michael Henchard has one too many and accidentally sells his wife to a sailor, along with his infant daughter. Next day, full of regret, he makes a vow to stop being a fucking knob and to accordingly sort his life out. Twenty years later he's the most successful corn magnate in the county and has been made mayor in recognition of his corn trading excellence. Donald Farfrae, a Scottish gentleman turns up with a new technique of doing something or other to corn of such mind-blowing innovation that Henchard hires him. Henchard's wife and daughter come into town because the sailor who purchased them has been lost at sea. Henchard is happy because he has his family again. Then his wife dies but he still has his daughter. Donald Farfrae fancies his daughter, which is annoying because Donald Farfrae seems generally more popular than grumpy old Henchard, which is itself a source of resentment to the mayor. Henchard finds a letter written by his late wife explaining that the daughter he sold to the sailor twenty years ago died shortly after, and Elizabeth Jane is actually the sailor's daughter. This is annoying because Henchard had told her she was his own kid whom he accidentally sold before she was old enough to form memories, and also because he's begun to find her irritating. His girlfriend Lucetta turns up next. Henchard hooked up with Lucetta after selling his wife to a sailor. Henchard, Lucetta, and Elizabeth Jane are going to live as a family, sort of, although Donald now fancies Lucetta, which is awkward. Henchard tells Elizabeth Jane that she's actually the sailor's daughter. The sailor turns up in search of his missing family,  but is sent away by Henchard who now wishes he hadn't told Elizabeth Jane about her real father. There's a load of other stuff, mostly Henchard telling fibs then being found out, over and over. Everybody now thinks he's a tit, not like that nice Mr. Farfrae who is, by the way, going to marry Lucetta. The townspeople make an effigy to mock Lucetta and she dies of embarrassment, or possibly a miscarriage. In a move somewhat foreshadowing certain life choices made by Woody Allen, Farfrae marries Elizabeth Jane. Henchard goes off somewhere and dies alone. You can't really blame him.

I read The Mayor of Casterbridge when I was at school and I thought it was great. Now, forty years later, I'm bewildered at it being regarded as Hardy's first masterpiece - according to Martin Seymour-Smith - and superior to the earlier Return of the Native, which I read mainly because I remembered liking this one so much. The Mayor of Casterbridge, a technically brilliant but ultimately simplistic novel reads, at least to me, like an early work in comparison to the greater ambition and scope of the previous book, and is perhaps the written equivalent to one of those beautifully rendered Victorian paintings intended to impart a heavy handed moral lesson in having the knockery young woman lasciviously checking out the common labourer's lunchbox while doves in the cage immediately behind her peck each other to death, amounting to, See!!! See!!! That's what happens, you thoughtless hussy!

Henchard makes a bad decision, accordingly fucks up, pisses everyone off, then regrets the decision whilst nevertheless resenting the injured parties - then does it again, over and over to the point at which only a fucking idiot could fail to see how it will end. Worse is that it's pretty easy to spot the emerging pattern more or less as soon as the much nicer and conspicuously more popular Mr. Farfrae shows up. For all the complexity with which Hardy renders Henchard's character, it's nevertheless a completely predictable character; also one which provides few clues as to how - seeing as Henchard is such a turd - he nevertheless somehow enjoyed two complete decades of not covering anything up, nor shooting himself in the foot, nor pissing everyone off.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is saved by Hardy's consistently compelling prose and the focus given to the emotional minutae of Henchard's fumbled social interactions, but unlike The Return of the Native, it presents everything up front with each conflict neatly tied off by the final page. It wouldn't be entirely fair to say it reads like an exercise in plotting, but it lacks the expressionist power of which Hardy was capable and borders on cloying Victorian sentiment.

As a point of interest, I notice that Hardy's pseudo-fictitious Wessex identifies Salisbury as Melchester, suggesting the possibility of both The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge having occurred in the same universe as Roy of the Rovers; which is itself unfortunately more interesting than this novel.