Alan Massie
The Retiring Novelist
Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited
By Michal Millgate
Oxford University Press 625pp £30
Michael Millgate wrote the first version of this biography twenty years ago. It has now been extensively revised, and much material not then available has been incorporated. It is fair to call it a new book. In any case, this question will be of little concern to most readers. Hardy is one of the oddest of the great English writers. That greatness is now well established; it's surely a long time since anyone spoke condescendingly, like Henry James, about 'little Tommy Hardy'. Certainly his prose is often clumsy. The historian G M Young, an admirer, admitted: 'it is doing his fame no service to deny that, of all our writers, he can be, at times, the flattest and the most ungainly. He succeeded to no tradition; he was imperfectly educated, cramped by a book-language which he could not shake himself free of . . . He never overcame his youthful addiction to melodrama; he never mastered the difference between strength and violence.' And yet, Young wrote, he felt often 'a craving for Hardy'. As for the poetry, there the ear can catch 'echoes of a still older music, borne on the carols and hymns of the Middle Ages, from Provence and far beyond'.
Hardy's world, which seemed old-fashioned in his own time. is now so remote as to have acquired something more than a period charm. His Wessex, dying, disappearing even as he wrote, now seems to us further away than Dickens's London, so completely have the rural landscape and society he depicted
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm