Hardy's Landscapes

ELT 45 : 1 2002 perbolic—and scarcely illuminating—metaphor can Michael Millgate's brief and tentative speculation about Hardy's possible impotence be said to "concretize" a "phantom" or to attempt to "identify" "a defining area of'deadness'" or a "phantom presence" in Hardy. And to pair it with the book-length nonsense of Deacon is grotesque. Finally, that a "real trauma in Hardy" is "inevitably reproduced in the stories told by [Hardy's] readers" is belied by the scores of biographical accounts which neither invent for Hardy a bastard child nor speculate that he was impotent —and, in any case, it is by no means clear what is intended by claiming that a "real trauma" is "inevitably reproduced" in "stories." Unfortunately, the remainder of Armstrong's section titled "Randy's Hand, Or the Lost Son" careens on in similarly unpersuasive fashion. But if Haunted Hardy has some real weaknesses—and it does—its strengths tend to outweigh them. Taken as a whole, Armstrong's fine scholarship and talent for contextualizing Hardy's poetry in illuminating ways makes it in most respects a welcome addition to the increasingly sophisticated discussion of Hardy's poetry. Robert Schweik State University of New York College at Fredonia Hardy's Landscapes Michael Irwin. Reading Hardy's Landscapes. New York: St Martin's Press, 2000. χ + 171 pp. $49.94 IN Reading Hardy's Landscapes, Michael Irwin urges us to appreciate Hardy's landscape descriptions. He aims "to show how much of the essential energy of a Hardy novel is to be found in the descriptive detail , especially in his depiction of landscape." Although this is not a particularly difficult point to prove, Irwin does amass a lot of evidence for it. He shows that Hardy's famously superb descriptions of the natural world—wind, earth, insects, trees, flowers, storms, and stars—are not just additional bonuses for Hardy's readers, not just background for the characters and nice settings for the plot, but in fact integral parts of Hardy's texts. According to Irwin, they serve to emphasize the characters ' immersion in the agricultural and natural environment, to express the psychological distress of his frequently inarticulate figures, and to place their tragedy into the larger context of ruthless nature. Thus the conflict, decay, erosion, change, and death of the landscape in Hardy becomes a poignantly meaningful setting for human narratives of loss. 94 BOOK REVIEWS It is clear that Michael Irwin loves Thomas Hardy's writing. Reading Hardy's Landscapes is an eloquent, heartfelt appreciation of Thomas Hardy by a critic intimately familiar with the whole Hardy corpus. By extracting and juxtaposing passages from across the wide expanse of Hardy's fiction, prose, and poetry, Irwin gives the reader a sense of Hardy's consistently rich observations of nature. Chapters on insects, noises, motion, erosion, and "concatenations" (places where insects, noises, motion, and erosion all occur together) cover virtually all of Hardy's descriptions of nature, especially since Irwin uses the categories fairly loosely. Comparing multiple passages from across all of Hardy's writing does yield some interesting information. Irwin points out certain patterns in Hardy's writing, like his reluctance to depict village or social life, his propensity to depict lovers gazing at the sleeping bodies of their beloveds, and his tendency to give a character an outburst of hyperactive energy to signal that s/he is falling in love. Moreover, after reading several similar passages about, say, aging faces, the reader gets a sense of the kind of images that haunted Hardy and recur most insistently in his fiction. Since this book derives from a course Irwin teaches at University of Kent, it is perfectly pitched for introductory undergraduate comprehension . Irwin's eloquence underlines the significance of Hardy's thought, in passages like this: "Though we are all evanescent, all subject to ageing and encroachment, we live at different speeds, see along different sight-lines. Man alone, through intellect and imagination, has partial access to alternative modes and scales of vision—an access which dooms him to inconsistencies of thought and conduct." This sort of rhetoric lends the book a sense of vast significance, which students will surely find inspirational. There is absolutely...