Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man

Right, so I didn't actually finish this book, and I know that is a bit shameful (a friend of mine is constantly pestering me-in a good way-to finish the books I left partially unread, and in the case of Franny and Zooey, it shall be rectified, but not just yet) but I honestly didn't find it particularly well-written. Which is odd, considering that it was written by an award-winning biographer, Claire Tomalin. It isn't that Hardy's life wasn't interesting, it totally was (did you know that Hardy originally trained to be an architect? No? Neither did I...) but it was just the style of writing that bored me to death. She was writing it as a casual observer from the present, not someone who tries to get into the subject's mind, or even as someone who particularly cares about the subject's life and times; in short, she was writing it as a typical biographer. Yes, understood, it is what she was doing with the book, but surely a story, even if it was about someone's life, should be woven like a story, should be personal to the reader and most definitely shouldn't just be a casual, factual narration of someone's life.

In any case, I found it difficult to read and rather boring. I didn't manage to get past the time that Hardy was sixteen; every time I opened the book I would find myself reading the same page over and over and over again, until I absolutely knew who Hardy had gone to study architecture with, what he liked reading and why it was such a big and radical step for his parents to pay the £40 for Hardy's architect training. The book was pure facts and figures, and it had no emotional relationship with the subject or the reader, which, in my view, is its fundamental flaw; if a book is going to be good, it needs a relationship with the reader and subject, it needs a definite story, and it needs more than facts and figures to make up that story. Granted, it is a biography so a story is a given, but it was the ways in which she, Tomalin, told the story that so bored me.

Anyway, that may just be me, but I am thoroughly through with biographies for the time being. Instead, I shall be reading Candide, by Voltaire, the famous French dramatist who, I'm told, wrote but one happy book in his entire career-this one.