~~It is impossible to “spoil” a nineteenth-century novel with its own Wikipedia page, but do be aware that my discussion below makes plot details explicit.~~

Previous Hardy experience: I’d read six of his novels—Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far From the Madding Crowd (1873; twice), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886; twice), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). I’m less familiar with his poetry but studied “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912) and “The Darkling Thrush” (1900) in enough detail to remember them.

It is slightly unfortunate that the two protagonist-lovers of the title should be named Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St. Cleeve, because these are exactly the sort of names that a good parodist would select for a satire of Hardy-esque tragi-romantic fiction. Nevertheless, here they are: Lady Constantine is an unhappily married woman in her late twenties whose abusive husband has absented himself on a hunting trip to Africa, of indeterminate length, and Swithin is a youth of nineteen whose grandmother lives in the area and who chooses to pursue his astronomical studies by using (without permission at first) a monument tower on the Constantine estate that stands in the middle of a field. Their meeting leads them to fall in love, but many and various plot complications—Viviette’s married state, to begin with, but also Swithin’s alleged intellectual promise, the eight-year difference in their ages, and a number of other developments which are rather silllier and more contrived—keep the course of their love from running smooth. Secret marriage, misunderstanding, abandonment and death, naturally, ensue.

The plot complications are best described as “farcical”. There is a scene in which Viviette is forced to hide behind the draperies of the bed in Swithin’s observation hut, while her brother and the Bishop of Melchester stand feet away from her discussing astronomic observational technique. Swithin’s misogynistic uncle leaves him a bequest of £400 p.a. on the condition that he not marry until he’s twenty-five; he receives notice of this condition on the day of his (secret) wedding to Viviette and chooses to ignore it, although she finds out eventually and her guilt over being the instrument of his impoverishment leads her to give him up when an opportunity presents itself. Perhaps most florid is the whole circumstance of Sir Blount Constantine’s death: Viviette is informed that he has died in Africa of a tropical illness, which turns out to be untrue. He’s still dead, but he died several months later than was reported, having recovered from illness, “married” a “native princess”, and then shot himself fatally in the head. Her secret marriage with Swithin occurred on a date after she thought Sir Blount dead—they aren’t intentional bigamists—but before he actually died, and therefore is invalid.

All of this is emotionally frustrating to read, but is placed against the background of a vast and uncaring cosmos. These two tiny human figures, struggling to find love and fulfillment, seem so small in the face of Swithin’s studies: the “voids and abysses” that he sees in the night sky, the once-in-a-lifetime comets and vastly distant nebulae with which he initially wins Viviette’s esteem. The indifference of the natural world feels very twentieth-century to me. At the end of this edition there’s an essay by a critic named Rosemary Sumter; she sees this as in the same vein as Conrad, Forster and Beckett, but I see H.G. Wells in it too. The nightmare shore of the far future in The Time Machine, for instance, shares some literary DNA with Viviette’s momentary, horrified glimpse of infinity through Swithin’s telescope. The problem is the piling-on of plot. I do agree with Sumter here: all of the endless, farcical complications—Hardy’s attempt to meld the absurd with the cosmic—diminish the starkness of two people against the universe.

If we choose, however, to accept that the ridiculously convoluted plotting is part of the plan (he’s writing a tragedy, after all), and engage with it seriously, what then? Well—my abiding question is, what would have happened if either of these people had any friends? Viviette lives alone in her vast matrimonial mansion, isolated from her social equals by a combination of a promise she made her (abusive) husband and her own pride; her older brother, Louis, is self-centered and mean, constantly suspicious of her behaviour and desperate for her to marry the Bishop of Melchester to aid in his own social climbing. Swithin has literally no one to talk to except for his elderly grandmother, the local parish priest, and Viviette. The crushing loneliness of their positions draw them to each other, and their mutually terrible decision-making is exacerbated by the lack of any compassionate outside perspective. If Swithin had befriended, let’s say, a young doctor in the village, or Viviette had one childhood friend who lived in the next parish over, the whole novel might never happen. Obviously their isolation is partly due to the basic demands of fiction (the novel has to happen, somehow), partly to the working-out of theme (two people, no recourse, a galaxy that couldn’t care less). But it interests me, too, because it is so difficult to imagine a twenty-first-century couple in this situation. How would you update Two on a Tower, if you decided to go about it? How recreate a social dynamic where two young people are so utterly disconnected from sources of constructive advice?

Among the stupider choices these characters make is the choice to keep the marriage between Viviette and Swithin a secret. There is no good reason for this. She believes her husband is dead at the time they marry, and—more pertinently—so does everyone else. The only half-stated reason for secrecy is Viviette’s fear that her country neighbours will scorn her for marrying beneath her station, but she’s hardly socialised for the past decade or so anyway; what does that matter? My sense of outrage and frustration is, perhaps, a rather good argument for Hardy’s ultimate success with characterisation—maybe with Viviette more than with Swithin. She’s complicated: her pride and her love work against each other, and as the novel draws to a close, her growth is obvious in her decision to prioritise her lover’s well-being (as she perceives it) above her own honour. Even when she discovers that she is pregnant by him (of course!) and must marry someone—inducing her to accept the Bishop of Melchester’s offer—her motives are more complex than simple panic. Swithin, on the other hand, is a simpler person, both because he’s younger and because he’s a scientist (Hardy seems unable to imagine scientists having rich inner lives); he often takes things literally, inflicting emotional pain on his wife when she, for instance, asks him to go away and he promptly does so instead of understanding that what she’s really asking for is some demonstration of support and affection. Men of logic, amirite?!

All of this is not to say I didn’t enjoy Two on a Tower. I did, very much. I raced through it, in fact. It’s a very compellingly told story, with a lovely simplicity of style and a narrow enough focus in terms of setting and dramatis personae to avoid any possibility of readerly overwhelm. If it also feels a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash, well, it’s a romantic tragedy, so it’s meant to. But it lacks the commitment to image and theme that makes, e.g., the Stonehenge scene in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (or, indeed, Tess's brother’s despairing comment early on in the same book: “Tis because we live on a blighted star, and not a whole one, isn’t it?”) so effective and affecting. Its reputation as a minor novel seems about right—but minor doesn’t mean no good.

This is the first in my 2024 B-Sides project, an attempt to read some minor works by authors whose “big books” I’ve already enjoyed. I’m aiming for one a month, with no set TBR.