For some reason, probably a dearth of Christie fare on ITV3, I was moved a few weeks ago to buy the BBC versions of 'Wessex Tales' and 'Jude the Obscure' from Amazon, rounded out by their collected edition in Kindle format, this last for the grand sum of £1.95 or some such. Very collected, that is to say very complete but not very conveniently presented. One can't really complain at the price.
We have now consumed the whole of the BBC purchase and some of the Kindle, that is to say the BBC stuff plus the last novel 'The Well Beloved', which I do not remember reading before. All good stuff, although it was a surprise how much the adaptations left out, leaving me with the thought that watching the adaptations was rather like looking at a mountain landscape with something, probably mist, obscuring all but the higher peaks. Inter alia, the adaptations seem to lose a lot of the background details which round the characters out, make them more believable, and most of the lightening, humourous asides.
One bit of input before we got going was that Hardy had a thing about hanging. And once this had been pointed out, one did come across rather a lot of it. What streak in his background drove it - given that both 'Jude the Obscure' and 'The Well Beloved' struck me as having plenty of material drawn from his own life? Lots of failed relationships, lots of unhappy marriages, lots of unhappy people. These last perhaps locked, unhappily, into the life of an artisan or the life of a married woman by the conventions of the time. Interesting how I found the Arabella of Jude quite a decent sort this time around, whereas my memory had her as a rather coarse and unpleasant women - and whereas her whole point, or so it seems now, is that she is attractive, even as an older woman, perhaps in part because she is common.
I quite often re-read the beginning of a book when I finish the first read, so I am now reading Jude again, although I don't suppose I will get terribly far before I drift off somewhere else, possibly D H Lawrence, the scene for whom was very much set, to my mind, by Hardy. Maybe I will have another go at the 'Wessex Tales', also new to me and also rather good. Just the thing for a spot of bedtime reading.
There is also the question of the unconscious, very much in Jude and very much in the air if not actually invented at the time that Hardy was writing. One wonders if he was conscious of the question or whether it was just in the air - while I don't recall it being in any of George Elliot's hair. In any event, one product of all this was a rather odd dream. I start off in some work-like environment, with some boss figure telling a young female colleague to give me a lift somewhere in her car, although it is clear to me that she is busy about something else and doesn't really want me in her car. Another young female and a child vaguely present. As a result of which I get her to drop me off as soon as we reach the main drag in town, let us say Christminster. Across the road is a large gate, opening out into a vista of colleges on the right. Open space to the left. I go through the gate to find that all the college buildings which had looked so imposing are pretty much ruins. Shells, perhaps bombed or burnt out. I push on past these buildings to find myself in a swimming pool, rather like that next to Dorking Halls, although that particular identification was not made in the dream. One large pool and one small. Quite a lot of people, large and small, in the pools. There is some kerfuffle about who is swimming and whether I ought to be there at all. Perhaps it is some special day for which I am not qualified. Somewhat flustered I get through the pool, at which point I wake up.
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