The Trumpet-Major Book

In the second collected edition of his novels, of 1912 (the "Wessex Edition"), Thomas Hardy divided his production into three groups: "novels of character and environment," "romances and fantasies," and "novels of ingenuity." This proved a defining critical move where the reception of his novels was concerned. The first and largest group, the novels of character and environment, evolved into the canon of "major" works'the Hardy perennials, we might call them (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of Native, etc.) The novels excluded from this dominant group were left more or less to wither on the vine.

This seems a shame to me, on the basis of a few recent forays into the "minor" Hardy. I enjoyed my one novel of ingenuity to date, the Wilkie Collinsesque Desperate Remedies, and I was intrigued by my first venture into Hardyan romance and/or fantasy, the bizarre, perverse The Well-Beloved. Minor Hardy is more restless and unpredictable than major Hardy, and less uniformly tragic and monumental. Where the canonical novels have an impressive, granitic unity of aesthetic purpose (such that they all tend to merge into one in my memory), the non-canonical ones are much more erratic; you never know quite which Hardy will show up.

That is true in spades for The Trumpet-Major (1880), which offers up a highly unexpected genre-bending, or genre-blending, concoction. It is a historical novel, set in the Napoleonic period, with a convoluted romantic plot, and a surprising element of comedy, which the notes to my edition attributes to Hardy's interest in the Victorian theatrical tradition of harlequinades, deriving ultimately from the commedia dell'arte. Anything less likely to have been penned by the author of Jude the Obscure can barely be imagined. It is recognizably Hardyesque only in its "Wessex" setting and its rich evocation of a vanished rural world.

By chance, this is the third Victorian novel I have read in recent years which revisits the period of the Napoleonic wars, the others being Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-48) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863). Similarities with both of these novels may be traced in The Trumpet-Major. All three feature a love triangle made up of a young woman and two sharply contrasted male admirers, one dashing, the other doggedly devoted'although Hardy ramps up the tension and poignancy by making his two suitors brothers. All three novels are concerned with the way in which personal lives are entangled with the larger forces of history (in which respect, they also connect with that other great Napoleonic-era historical epic, War and Peace.)

In its treatment of this theme, The Trumpet-Major reminded me especially of Sylvia's Lovers. It chooses a rural setting, far from the sites of power, and it draws much of its philosophical depth from the conjunction of a timeless country life (the main setting of The Trumpet-Major is an ancient mill, its threshold "worn into a gutter by the ebb and flow of feet … since Tudor times") with an acute, historical crisis, in the form of the anticipated Napoleonic invasion.

The threat of war looms across the novel, in a strange'but, for me, successful'triangulation with the comedy and the romantic convolutions. The Trumpet-Major opens with the arrival of troops sent in 1804 to protect the port of Weymouth. This army sets up camp on the downs near Hardy's fictional village of Overcombe, provoking unwonted ripples of excitement and foreboding among the locals. Across the course of the novel, the young men of the village come under increasing pressure to sign up for the war effort, voluntarily or otherwise (a dramatic press-gang episode is one of the features The Trumpet-Major shares with Sylvia's Lovers.) The juxtaposition of comic and serious, high and low, in the novel recalls Shakespeare, whom Hardy cites frequently here.

One thing I loved in the novel is the way in which Hardy uses the motif of the written word to dramatize his rural world's liminality. In one episode, we learn of the trajectory of the village's sole newspaper, retained first for a few days by the decrepit "squireen" Benjamin Derriman; then passed on to the genteel, if impoverished, Mrs Garland, mother of the heroine, Anne Garland, before descending into the lower depths of Overcombe society, and eventually finishing up wrapping butter and cheese. Similarly, when Miller Loveday, father of the two rival brothers, receives news that a letter has arrived for him in Weymouth, the nearest post town, it sets off a frisson in the village such that, by the time he comes to read it, he is observed by an audience of neighbours, who line up in his doorway to watch, overlapping like a fanned pack of cards.

The introduction to the edition I read (Penguin Classics) speaks of the novel having attracted some criticism for its supposedly distant and ironic, empathy-sapping representation of its lead characters. I'm not so sure about that. I became quite involved in the entangled story of Anne's love quadrangle (besides John and Bob Loveday, she counts among her suitors the absurd'and splendidly named'Festus Derriman, a kind of latter-day miles gloriosus.) Anne is an interesting and distinctive figure, not always entirely likeable; and both the melancholy and stalwart John Loveday, the trumpet-major of the title, and his more mercurial brother Bob, are well-drawn. There is some magnificent descriptive writing, as well'perhaps most sustained in the poignant episode of Anne's pilgrimage to the isle of Portland to see the Trafalgar-bound Victory sail past.

In some ways, looking back, the Portland episode felt like the climax of the novel for me. The final fifth of the book reads as a little more rushed than what precedes it'the only reason why I gave this book four stars, rather than the five that it promised up to this point. Nonetheless, The Trumpet-Major was a hugely pleasurable read for me; and it left me determined to continue rooting around in Hardy's supposed B-list. I have three more "romances and fantasies" to go (A Pair of Blue Eyes; Two on a Tower, and the short-story collection, A Group of Noble Dames) and three more "novels of ingenuity" (The Hand of Ethelberta; The Laodicean; and the short-story collection, A Changed Man.)