It comprises thirty-two chapters, each focusing on one of Hardy's individual works (although The Dynasts receives three chapters, and the "lost," unpublished first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, also receives one, as do the early sketch "How I Built Myself a House" and the late play The Queen of Cornwall). The order of the chapters is determined by the date of publication of their title-work, and each chapter contains, in a ponderously formulaic way, first a bit of biography related to the period of its text's production, then a more extended unearthing of the books that Hardy may have read and of which traces can be identified in the text under consideration, and finally a few "critical" reflections on that text. This repetitive structure - invariably introduced by weary bridging sentences such as "The life-component of this work appear[s] in..." (p. 238), or "Other vestiges of Hardy's old love of...literature can be spotted throughout the collection" (p. 224) - is further reinforced by Paul Turner's reiteration of a couple of "themes" that he descries throughout Hardy's work. By the end, if I came across another paragraph introducing "the concept of "agnosia" ("unknowing") or another revelation of Hardy's "concern for animals" (p. 69) inscribed in every text, I though I might scream.
Despite the jacket-blurb's claim for "Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account," the biographical passages offer scarcely anything new, being largely and self-admittedly (p. xi) based on Hardy's own self-fashioning biography, "Florence Emily Hardy's" The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928; on Michael Millgate's reconstituted version of that work, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (1984); and on well-known modern biographies by Millgate himself and Robert Gittings. When Turner does strike out on his own, it is in the inconclusive-speculative mode: "He...had perhaps spoiled his marriage to increase his literary earnings" (p. 94); "perhaps the Emma that he had loved seemed to be vanishing too" (p. 117); "she probably wanted more support from her husband than he was then able to give her" (p. 126); "Hardy's next volume would made Gosse hope his friend was not quite as unhappy as his poetry. But he probably was" (p. 206). The funniest example of this unconvincing tic - and one that also signals Turner's arch attitude to matter sexual - is the following ("penetrating"?) comment on Emma and Hardy's honeymoon: "How they got on in bed is no business of ours" (p. 43) - where the implication is that if it were "our business" then we could somehow retrieve the newlywed's goings-on. Sadly, we can but speculate. Elsewhere, Turner flatly refutes the notion that Miss Aldclyffe ("this lady behaving so oddly" in Desperate Remedies) "Makes what nowadays look like Lesbian advances to Cytherea. Nothing could have been further from the author's or his publisher's mind" (p. 24). On Hardy's tendency to record descriptions of girls seen on trains, Turner reflects: "But perhaps his interest was not purely professional" (p. 69). And having quoted Hardy's image of Florence Dugdale in his poem "On the Departure Platform" as "A wee white spot of muslin fluff," Turner makes the hilariously "incorrect" comment: "but he was not looking for a bit of fluff" (p. 195). Is this a book for modern readers!
But the book's "critical" dimension is its most serious failing in the context of contemporary Hardy criticism, which, like it or not, is now highly sophisticated in theory and practice. Turner's critical reflections, which are often no more than asides delivered on the hoof, represent an outmoded belles-lettrist insouciance so unthinking in its presuppositions and judgments that I believed it had long since passed away. Let me offer a potpourri of such offerings without further comment. On The Trumpet-Major Turner concludes: it is "a dull novel. The characters and plot are too theatrical to be convincing. Intended to be a 'good woman,' the heroine turns out a rather silly one....Altogether the novel seems unworthy of him..." (p. 72). Of the reception of The Mayor of Casterbridge Turner notes, with retrospective perspicuity: "neither critics nor readers had realized the novel's greatness" (p. 93); and of earlier criticism of Life's Little Ironies: "Tastes have changed since then, and nastiness has become a literary value - but what of improbability? Certainly Sod's Law never operates in real life with such concentrated efficiency as it does in this book" (p. 139). Of the characters in The Well-Beloved Turner opines: "they are not very interesting people. As for Jocelyn himself, he is real enough to make us sometimes feel ashamed of him....But he is often less like a person than figure in a day-dream or tall story" (p. 158). (Who said "character-criticism" was finished?) Of The Dynasts he comments: "the pleasure of reading...is slightly spoilt by the oddness of the diction" (p. 191), and that by "covering at speed [its] extensive landscape...we can still get pleasure from passing details of versification" (pp. 202-3). The "Satires of Circumstance" poems fare no better: "the tone is so far-fetched that one feels like dismissing [them]...as a symptom of paranoia" (p. 223); the poems in Moments of Vision are "mostly short, in purpose-built stanzas that rhythmically read themselves" (p. 233); and what Late Lyrics and Earlier "added to Hardy's existing achievement was chiefly verbal music and relevance to real life" (p. 242). To J. Hillis Miller and all of the other serious and thoughtful modern critics of Hardy's fiction and poetry in 1998, all one can say in light of this is: keep on trucking!
The sections on the literary references in Hardy's work are patchily original and illuminating - especially those on his use of the classics. But again, they are presented formulaically in a dense continuous prose format that makes them almost unreadable - certainly for initiates who thought that something called "a critical biography" was exactly what they needed to understand Hardy better. These sections comprise the kinds of material one expects to find in "Companion" volumes like F. B. Pinion's invaluable A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and Their Background (1984). Turner's knowledge is impressive, but it is presented in such a way as to defeat its possible usefulness as source information. This is compounded by the peculiar and unhelpful way that the references to the endnotes are numbered. Obviously intended to save space, a single number at the end of each paragraph services all of the references made in it. You get used to it, but it is not user-friendly.
The presentation of the book's most potentially valuable material, then, is clumsily off-putting as it stands. But if the "biographical" and "critical" elements had been omitted, and the book had been set up in a kind of "hand-book" format that allowed easy codified access to the varied and extensive range of literature that Hardy was drawing on, then it would have fulfilled a useful purpose in revealing how his reading found its way into specific novels and poems. Unfortunately, however, Turner's book remains a largely unilluminating addition to the already overladen "Life-of-Hardy" corpus. Even the poorly reproduced black-and-white illustrations - sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes overfamiliar - underpin one's overall sense of the volume's oddity and superfluity.