The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

As I started reading this book, I thought it felt a bit like reading a soap opera. When I learned that The Mayor of Casterbridge had been written as a serial novel, it made sense - chapter by chapter, Hardy had to keep the narrative moving along to hold his readers' interest from one installment to the next. And the plot did move along at a rapid pace. Every time I finished a chapter, I was ready to move on to the next so that I could find out what was going to happen.

But while the plot was engaging, I thought other literary aspects suffered bit. We were never really held in suspense for more than a few pages, and Hardy seemed intent to tell us, rather than to show us, the sentiments and motivations of characters both major and minor. There was less room than I would have liked for me, the reader, to experience the story.

One natural comparison that I made as I read was to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I read maybe three years ago. Just as in Tess, Hardy centers the story around a single character spiraling down into ever-deeper depths of misfortune. And as in Tess, this downward spiral is punctuated by moments where it appears that everything will be made right. Except that it isn't.

But unlike Tess, here the downward spiral of the central character, Henchard, is driven largely by his own self - his character, faults, fears, responses - as they collide with circumstance. In Tess, the downward spiral was almost entirely due to circumstances external to the central character's ability to influence change. This difference dramatically changed how I read the book. I found that the hopelessness coupled with the helplessness of Tess made it difficult for me to read, no matter how engaging the writing or the story. But I never experienced that same difficulty with The Mayor of Casterbridge. (Admittedly the effect was also helped by the existence of a secondary character to whom were were made sympathetic and whose fortunes were not doomed to tragedy from the beginning.)

The second comparison I made was one that I did not make until quite suddenly in the final chapter. It was then that I realized that the story bears resemblance to the story of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, a book that moved me deeply when I read it a number of years ago. Though Mayor is nowhere near as grand in scope, it is, like Les Miserables, the story of a young man who makes a mistake, turns around and changes, acquires a daughter, and then encounters his past and cannot escape it, carrying his mistakes with him to his deathbed. Interestingly, it was the dissimilarity of the death scene that caused me to notice the core similarities of the rest of the story. And the differences between the two stories turned Mayor into something deeper and more thought-provoking than it had been during my reading. If I had the time and energy and any sort of reasonable motivation, I think it would be really interesting to write some sort of comparison between the two novels. But, you know, this is why I didn't become an English major...