Max Gate

 Well, my impulse purchase of Damien Wilkins's Max Gate turned out to be a good one. Since I last mentioned it, I have finished reading it (at my usual snail's pace), and found it thoroughly enjoyable (apart from a few jarring anachronisms – 'Okay', 'in denial', 'basically'). It's actually the second Thomas Hardy-related novel I've read, the other being Howard Jacobson's scabrous Peeping Tom, the narrator of which is obsessed by Hardy, whom he regards as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag' – a case he makes rather effectively. Hardy doesn't come out of Max Gate too well either: the great man is self-absorbed, touchy, obsessed with his reputation and his legacy, grossly insensitive to those around him, especially the women (unless he has a crush on them), and apparently more caring about animals than his fellow humans. The narrator, Nellie Titterington, a housemaid, is very clear-eyed about her master, but she is telling the story with the benefit of hindsight: the action is set in 1928, and Nellie, who escaped domestic service, is writing some decades later. 
   The second half of the book is more interesting than the first, as Florence Hardy, the author's unfortunate (and much younger) second wife, comes to the fore. This poor woman, condemned to type out her husband's autobiography in the third person and pass it off as her biography of him – and obliged to endure his fixation on his dead first wife and his moping over a young actress – is in an awkward position, having begun life at Max Gate as Hardy's typist, so she has some fellow feeling with the servants, and they with her. The other major figures in the narrative are Sydney Cockerell and Sir James Barrie, who are hovering around the dying author, determined to secure him a burial in Westminster Abbey, despite his wish to be buried in his family plot. Florence has a sad crush on Barrie, and Nellie pities her for being 'married to a corpse and swooning over a bronchial eunuch'. The story of what happened to Hardy's body is well known, and has perhaps been slightly embroidered, but it makes a good, if ghoulish, story. Wilkins handles all this material deftly enough, though he has sometimes to modify the narratorial voice with moments of omniscience. The book works well as a black comedy, as well as a convincing window on the airless world of Max Gate, and it is, as I said, a thoroughly enjoyable read.