Posy Simmonds
TAMARA DREWE
112pp. cape. £16.99.
978 0 224 07816 0

There is a revealing if not quite romantic story about the illustration of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd – his tale of contending suits and the wrong marriage. The novel first appeared as a serial in the Cornhill magazine, running in twelve monthly instalments from January 1874. The magazine’s editor, Leslie Stephen, adorned the text with a series of woodcuts he had commissioned from Helen Paterson, a highly regarded former pupil of Frederic Leighton’s. When novelist and illustrator met in person for the first and (as far as we know) only time, at the Pall Mall Café in May 1874, she was twenty-six, and he thirty-four; each was engaged to be married that August, Helen to the Irish poet William Allingham, a man of fifty, Hardy to his long-term fiancée Emma Gifford. Whatever was said at the dinner, she subsequently declined his invitation to further work – on The Laodicean – claiming she had given up book illustration for good.

As late as 1906, however, when the widow Helen Paterson Allingham was a well-known watercolourist, Hardy described her ruefully in a letter to Edmund Gosse as “the best illustrator I ever had”; the letter goes on to surmise, with a huff of profanity, that “these two simultaneous weddings would have been one but for a stupid blunder of God Almighty”. And it is to Mrs Allingham – or “H.P.”, as she is designated there – that Hardy dedicates a poem of 1914, called “The Opportunity”, where she is cast as one of those missed chances on which he liked to dwell. The third stanza runs,

Had we but mused a little space
At that critical date in the Maytime,
One life had been ours, one space,
Perhaps, till our long cold claytime.

Tamara Drewe is the second of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novels, after Gemma Bovery (1999), to base itself on a classic work of fiction; and it is tempting to propose it as the perfect match between text and picture. Simmonds first came to fame as a cartoonist for the Guardian, where Tamara appeared last year as a weekly feature; and her visual invention, enhanced here by a step from monochrome into colour, may still take the lead: her shrewdest characterization is done in clothes. But the book will take as long to “read” as many an ordinary novel, and its single most impressive attribute is the brilliant management of what would be termed, in a purely literary context, the plot.

The first page of artwork presents an advertisement, torn from the classified section of a literary journal, which at once points to the source: “Far from the Madding Crowd. Working retreat for writers. Easy access M96”. (Readers can adjust to the sharpness of the detailing ahead by discovering that the “M96” is a crash-test site in the Cotswolds.) The village is Ewedown, the postal district (as glimpsed on a letterhead) is Bournemouth: we might call the setting Wessex.

The retreat is run by Beth Hardiman (there is plenty of gentle wordplay), a good, busy, unglamorous woman of fifty, who is also required to manage the life of her husband Nicholas, creator of the lucrative series of “Doctor Inchcombe” detective novels. (Nicholas “likes to show off to women”, and as the book opens he is guiding his wife through the ruins of his latest affair in publishing, with Nadia from foreign rights – “I won’t lie. She was important to me”.)

In this nest of authors, Beth is one of four characters whose informal diaries and scrapbook recollections are the means through which the story emerges. The others are Glen Larson, an American academic in semi-permanent residence, an inert, spongey presence and mild opportunist; Casey, a teenage girl from the council houses with no expectations, who reports the incursions into the plot of her more adventurous friend, Jody; and Tamara Drewe herself – the counterpart of Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene – who has returned to the village on the death of her mother to take over the farmhouse they bought there, and to write an undemanding column about it for the Monitor. (Her own urban “improvement”, in Hardy’s term, is symbolized by the surgeon’s reduction of her rustic “hooter” to a neat little modern nose.)

Like Bathsheba, Tamara has her affections pulled three ways. The flashy, irresponsible Sergeant Troy is refigured as Ben, the former drummer of the band Swipe, the connection picked out in a scarlet jacket worn on the band’s promotional photos. Ben is an unshaven layabout with a rank philosophy (“Life’s a shit sandwich sometimes”) and a yellow Porsche; like Troy, he becomes involved with the heroine while sulkily fixed on an old flame. Alone of the characters here, he is shown to make nothing: not literature of any kind; not Beth’s cakes and dinners; not Jody’s fantasies of love beyond her station; not even the songs he once wrote for his band; only money. Yet Ben is no Victorian villain either, for he deals clumsily but decently with the overflow of Jody’s infatuation. And as he withdraws from Tamara’s bed, Nicholas Hardiman moves in, with squirearchical certainty. Waiting by various gates and cabbage patches, meanwhile, is the uprooted Gabriel Oak figure of Andy Cobb, with his bouquet of “earth, dog, tobacco, engine oil”, gardener to the incomers and conscience of the village, ready to rake up the pieces.

But to approach this book through reference to Hardy’s novel risks neglecting its richness, its originality, its very particular imaginative coherence. For one thing, the plot is propelled by modern gadgetry. Liaisons are “papped” on “mobies”. Young Jody sets the whole thing racing by breaking into Tamara’s house and computer to send her potent version of Bathsheba’s valentine: an email to Ben, subject “Love”, cc’d to Nicholas and Andy, reproduced here in Arial 10pt, reading “I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life”. And a consumer product new to the market proves a fatal instrument.

If there was a time when what Posy Simmonds seemed to offer was an “entertaining satire on the middle classes”, that limitation no longer applies. There is nothing in Hardy, you might say, which more grimly conveys the paralysis of lesser rural life than her pictures of Casey and Jody at the old bus shelter. Andy Cobb laments that Ewedown now has “no shop, no bus, no post office”, but it is the teenage population who have to act out the consequences: “We were going to get a lift into Hadditon with Jody’s mum, but decide not to – we’re skint, it’s freezing, and getting back means staying there bloody hours till her mum finishes her shift at Tesco”. On the verbal side, Posy Simmonds has the knack of rendering particular idioms, such as the vinegary flavour of the kids’ “sex” talk, without overdoing it: “Furthest she’s ever gone was with Sam. Clothes on, zip stuff. Patted the dog through the letterbox”; “Ryan’s been standing there porking out on Quavers”. There is real punch, too, in Jody’s burst of anger at Nicholas because “he’s a cheater, like my dad”. Then, just as Casey has amazed herself by stumbling on a modest romance of her own – “When Ryan throws his ciggie down I throw mine down too” – their first kiss is illuminated by the arrival of an ambulance in Aspen Close.

When, on stage at the Monksted Literary Festival, rattled by the presence in the audience of both wife and girlfriend, Nicholas announces the death of his detective Inchcombe, “a gust of dismay” blows through the gathering, “as though a real death’s been announced”. Readers may feel a similar jolt as this book reaches its double climax. But it is now part of Posy Simmonds’s repertoire as a storyteller to shock and disturb. That said, one of the book’s fatalities is treated, rather charmingly, in the spirit of its victim, as a murder mystery. The autopsy reveals death by “multiple injuries inflicted by the cows” – a spooked herd of Belted Galloways – “and a collision with the water trough”. But the quiet American – cake-eating, feet-up Glen – has secrets of his own.

Mick Imlah is Poetry editor of the TLS.

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