Halls of the Dark Muse

I am relatively new to reading Thomas Hardy and I have developed something of a love hate relationship with him. While on the one hand I acknowledge his talent as a writer, and think his prose is beautifully written. His stories in themselves are engaging and his writing is easy to read and never feels truly tedious.

I have not truly disliked anything of his I have read, but the problem I have is often I find his heroes/heroines to be infuriating and intolerable. There is a certain aspect of this woe is me attitude in his books, in which his main characters will spend the entirety of the book lamenting and wallowing in self-pity and taking on this helpless, victim, poor me, I am doomed by rate attitude, and quite frankly it can get danged obnoxious after a while. After a while I find myself just wanting to tell them to shut up and get over it.

I recently finished reading Far From Madding Crowd and at first I was reluctant and on the fence about that one because generally speaking I am turned off by love triangle scenario's and one synopses I read about the book over emphasized the romantic aspect of it and made it sound like something I normally would not be interested in reading, but after a while I decided to give it a try.

And I have to say it is close to one of my favorite things I have read by Hardy thus far. I am kind of torn because on the one hand I think that Jude the Obscure is a better story and more strongly written, as well as dealing with more complex ideas, but on the other hand Bathsheba is presently my favorite character of his. She seemed to me much more proactive in her life, she made some mistakes, and she had her moments of feeling despair, but she did not she did not have that fatalistic complex. She actually made choices in her life and took actions to try and rectify her circumstances. She did not accept her sorrow as a yoke, but bucked up. And Gabriel Oak was awesome, and has the coolest name.

There were still a few moments where I wanted to just shake one of the characters but in some ways this was one of the least annoying (or at least had the fewest annoying moments) of previous books I have read by Hardy so it was highly enjoyable to read.

I also liked the fact that while on the one hand it was not all doom and gloom and for was more on the light side especially for Hardy, on the other hand it was not too light-hearted. I don't like overly sentimental bright and sunny books. So yes I enjoyed the fact that there some dark clouds and disturbing elements to this book to balance it out for me.