It’s over a year since I last put down a Thomas Hardy novel. That was The Woodlanders. After completing his major works some years ago, I’d wanted to venture into the territory of his slightly lesser known works before finally completing the Hardy novel canon with his very much little known works. It took me a couple of years to get through The Woodlanders. Not because I wasn’t enjoying the book. But in the midst of all that time my mum passed away after a difficult time with lung cancer. My life turned on an axis and I temporarily divorced myself from the literary and theatre world. It was a necessity at the time. I inherited my love of books and theatre from her and it was she who was my closest book buddy. That’s a tough loss to manage.
So almost two years after her death I finally completed The Woodlanders. A part of me wanted to shout it from the rooftops that I had finally finished a whole novel in the time since she’d died. Another part of me wanted to celebrate that achievement quietly, just with myself and my closest people. For me, it was huge. It felt fitting, too, that it should be a novel which is very much about loss and coming back to nature that bridged all that time.
A year on and I decided to pick up my copy of The Trumpet Major from my little touched bookshelves. A little over three years ago I had been determined to find a physical copy the book in a bookstore, rather than ordering it online. Success came when I found one tucked away in City Books in Brighton & Hove (I highly recommend going if you’re ever there). So there it was beckoning for me to pick it up three years or so on, around the third anniversary of my mum’s death.
My seventh of Hardy’s novels, The Trumpet Major was unknown to me. One of those rare classics that I knew nothing of the story and very little of Hardy’s approach before reading. It follows the story of Anne Garland and her three suitors in the writer’s native Wessex with the backdrop of Napoleon’s threat of invasion on English shores. Its beauty lies in the way it shares great likeness with its predecessors and its successors and yet it diverges in many ways. There’s a lightness of touch, perhaps through Hardy’s recurrent use of irony, which is surprising but refreshing, but this is also fused with a lingering darkness of violence and war. It’s this blend of romance, history and tragi-comedy which makes The Trumpet Major feel a little different from many of Hardy’s other works.
There are twists and turns as the three suitors appear, disappear and reappear, battling with their desire for Anne and their commitment to their country’s cause. Each one endowed with contrasting qualities: the intrusive and near abusive squire’s nephew Festus, the spirited and flighty sailor Robert (Bob) Loveday, and the steadfast and loyal trumpet major John Loveday. Anne, an assertive young woman, weaves her own web as she transfers her preference from one to another, all influenced by her class consciousness and her widow-mother’s opinions. History itself could be termed a character in this novel as its driving force determines, or at the very least affects, the outcome for the younger members of its world.
Where nature – both natural world and human evolution – plays a striking role in novels such as Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, as a force which is ever present and could even be said to govern the goings-on of its lead characters, it feels far less dominant in The Trumpet Major, to the point that it verges on being un-Hardy-esque. It is perhaps this absence which prevents the novel having quite the emphatic, lasting effect which made the aforementioned works so well loved.
But for all its faults, if they can be terms faults, or merely differences, little can be taken away from the light-of-touch, often humorous, sometimes sad quality of this novel and its story.
The Literary Land 