Situations, desires, hopes are set up and cruelly dashed as the beautiful narrative machinations begin cranking - the man-trap scene had me literally sweating. What astonishes first is Hardy's plot, related by a weirdly troubling narrator, awesomely intricate in itself, but full of an almost Nabokovian sadism. Not the characters, who rarely rise above their stock roles - the decent, honourable heroine impossibly torn between passion and propriety the manly, back-to-nature hero, who could come straight from Cold Comfort Farm the impoverished aristocratic cad his wealthy lover, the promiscuous bored ex-actress gold digger the bumbling middle-class trader of lowly origins. The Woodlanders is a masterpiece and absolute joy to read for two reasons. The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterborne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury.
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