The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

There was a time when reading Thomas Hardy novels was almost a rite of passage, at least in my part of the world.  I spent many an hour being made perfectly miserable by Hardy as I waded through The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  Tess polished me off, and I swore that I didn't need Hardy to make me sad as I could do that all on my own.

That was over thirty years ago.  Recently, I detected that my happiness quotient was quite high, so I thought I would give Hardy another go:  'Do your darnedest, Tom!' I said.  'Bring me down, I dare you.'

Well, I wish I had read this one all those years ago.  Compared to Tess, it is positively joyous.  Oh, it has its fair share of misery, but the supporting cast is affable and two of the five protagonists end up happily.

Amongst other things, The Return of the Native is about love triangles.  Set in Egdon Heath, a fictional expanse of furze and heather in Hardy's Wessex, the ephemeral human inhabitants eke out a fragile living from the eternal landscape, just as their ancestors had done through the long ages.  Most are happy to be in the land where they were born and raised.  Some are not.

Clym Yeobright, the native of the title, returns from a long stint in Paris where he worked in the diamond trade.  As exciting as Paris may have been, Clym has decided that Egdon Heath is his true home, and he has come to settle down.  In returning, he disrupts a love triangle between the beautiful Eustacia Vye, the wayward Damon Wildeve and the unimaginative Thomasin Yeobright, Clym's cousin.  Eustacia, who had already told Wildeve 'I wish I hated the heath less - or loved you more', becomes smitten with Clym as she perceives him to be her ticket out of the place, being unaware of his plans to stay.

Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.

Given this, can Clym and Eustacia become anything but star-crossed lovers?  What now for Thomasin and Wildeve?  And moving in and out of the action is the stalwart and diligent outcast Diggory Venn, whose profession excludes him from the love he deserves - what of him?

Hardy does a sterling job of setting up the place and its people.  Slowly and surely we are introduced to the protagonists and their dilemmas.  We see their actions play out as they succumb to their foibles rather than playing to their strengths.  Fate intervenes to twist their trajectories in unexpected ways.  Immovable objects collide with irresistible forces, so there is a lot wreckage.  And in amongst all this are Hardy's observations of the human condition, for example:

A man should be only partially before his time: to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame.

 and

So the subject recurred: if [Clym] were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative.

For the newly-fledged youngster starting out in the world of work and love there is a lot of vital, if sometimes grim, wisdom to be had from The Return of the Native.  Hardy has even foreshadowed Stephen Sondheim's advice: 'never fall in love during a total eclipse.'  Do it at your peril.  You have been warned.