The Return of the Native

I've asserted before that saying you love Alan Rickman is a non-controversial thing to say, so when I found an audiobook of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native on BBC Audio, read by Alan Rickman, I knew what my next commuting book would be.

Rickman has a wonderfully expressive voice, and hearing it describing Egdon Heath for the whole first chapter of the novel was a fitting introduction to the darkness and isolation of the locale. And the scenery through which I drove seemed similar to me, as "overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent."

The natives of Egdon Heath seem to me like the natives of the place where I'm living. They have their rituals and festivals, they don't always seem very bright, at least to outsiders (witness the continuing coverage of the John Freshwater controversy and the recent vandalism of the local Democratic party headquarters), and they're content to stay in the place they were born, or to return to it after marriage or schooling.

So yes, I identified to some extent with Eustacia, who longs to leave this scenic countryside for the excitements of Paris. I did not sympathize much at all with Clym, the native who, Oedipus-like, comes home to the heath only to end up mostly blind and speaking more loyally about the memory of his mother than to the living woman he has married.

Although of course, his mother is right; Mrs. Yeobright opposes her niece Thomasin's marriage to Wildeve, and she opposes her son Clym's marriage to Eustacia, and if they would just listen to her....well, but they don't.

The novel is full of fascinating characters going about the little tasks of their daily life as if doom isn't just around the corner, culminating with the fashioning of a wax voodoo doll by one of the most rustic and--up to that point--unimportant characters, another protective mother.

Part of the fascination, as usual in a Victorian novel, is the emotional fervency of the characters. You'd almost think that a person who venerates his mother this fervently after her death would have listened to her in life: "It is an unfortunate fact that any particular whim of parents, which might have been dispersed by half an hour's conversation during their lives,
becomes sublimated by their deaths into a fiat the most absolute, with such results to conscientious children as those parents, had they lived, would have been the first to decry."

The heath is such a character in the story that it's easy to imagine--especially having the novel read out loud to you--that its darkness calls up an answering darkness in the characters, a desire to become one with emptiness.