When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I
hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy
ending. That’s what you might conclude it was, based on the cover, but if so you’d
be sadly disappointed. I thought I had to read it after tackling Queen of Stones earlier in the year, and anticipated it would be a baleful piece of work
to judge by its predecessor. I hadn’t expected my initial confusion: Tess is
the title, and there are three Tesses – it’s a theme of the book that the fate
of women repeats in successive generations, ‘the ballad is played and played again’
– the fictional one imagined by Thomas Hardy, the narrator Liza-Lu’s sister,
and the baby to whom the story is being told. There are also two Marys, the narrator’s
mother, and her niece. Deft writer as she is, Tennant keeps pointing out in the
text who is being referred to, but it takes a while to get your head around the
repetitions. There are other aspects of the book that you might struggle to get
your head around: it’s moving towards the revelation of a secret, repeatedly signalled
by the narrator in case we forget it’s coming, which might have seemed shocking
in 1994 but now feels predictable; and the narrative is broken up by wodges of
a feminist manifesto which may, or may not, be the author’s own. It might have
been better to let the story make the point.
And the point is pointed enough, and well enough made,
when the tale gets the chance to: that females are the raw material of the fantasies
of males, and suffer for it. Baby Tess, granddaughter of Liza-Lu’s sister Tess,
represents the generation who might break the cycle and begin the healing of
both humanity and the earth (the novel’s environmental urgency was unusual for
the time). Part of Tennant’s programme is to wrest control of the Dorset
landscape from Thomas Hardy, and she never misses an opportunity to insult or
malign him: in this novel he becomes not a complex and divided man with deep flaws,
but an unmitigated monster, so captivated by the imaginary woman he creates that he manipulates and damages every real one he has anything to do with. The action takes place between Abbotsbury, West Bay
and Beaminster, the landscape spared the phantasmagoric treatment evident in Queen
of Stones so that Tennant’s characters can realistically inhabit it. She imagines
the eagles on the gateposts at Mapperton House coming alive, and mentions in
passing the old nightclub that ran on the coast road out of Bridport near
Burton Bradstock, and you have to be fairly familiar with the history of Dorset
to know about that. Casterbridge seems a long way away.
Tess is ambitious and extreme, but not so complex that you can’t look past its flaws. It’s never going to displace the ‘real’ Tess, but it does enough to stake a place in Hardy’s shadow, insisting that his vision isn’t the only way of looking at Dorset, and at humanity.
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