THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE

G. K. Chesterton noted that in Hardy's dour novels of the English midland Hardy became a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. Perhaps, but the broody heaths of Dorset were never more powerfully, more oppressively portrayed. Can one, therefore, claim to enjoy a reading of a Hardy novel? One can if the reader is as superb as Nigel Anthony, who in tone and style nicely communicates all the vividness, beauty and depth, as well as the fatalistic gloom, for which Hardy is justly esteemed. Earthy enough in his spot-on characterizations, he lacks only a certain virility that this reviewer finds an essential wellspring of Hardy's irony. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAR 97]