Right — pull up a chair, or a turnip, or whatever passes for furniture these days — because I’ve just finished The Three Strangers and by Jupiter’s whiskers, what an experience it was. Like trying to shave a goat on a merry-go-round.
It’s a night so wet it would make Noah look skywards and say, “You what, again?” There’s a christening happening, yes, a fine, damp, musical sort of gathering — fiddles squeaking, beer flowing, half the parish crammed into a shepherd’s hut smelling of mutton and ambition. Everyone’s holed up in this cottage, squashed tighter than a bishop’s buttocks at a tax audit.
When I flopped down to read The Three Strangers, I was fully expecting the usual Hardy fare — you know, doomed love, dead sheep, someone getting flattened by an unexpected cow — but what I got instead was a story so delightfully daft it practically did a cartwheel off the page and landed in my soup.
It begins, naturally, on a night so wet even the ducks were filing formal complaints. Hardy paints it all: the damp, the drizzle, the mud thicker than a bureaucrat’s brain. Smells of wet sheep and missed opportunities. You can almost hear the trees sighing in despair and the crows writing out angry letters to the council. Hardy, never one to miss a chance to drench his characters in atmosphere (and actual rainwater), sets the scene in a cottage packed tighter than a suitcase packed by a man with no concept of physics. There’s a christening underway, which in Hardy’s universe is about as safe as juggling chainsaws on a unicycle. Sure enough, before the cake’s even been sliced, in tumble the strangers — three of them, one after the other, like clowns piling out of a tiny car.
First Stranger: looks so unremarkable he could hide in a shadow and still be the most boring thing in it. A man you’d forget faster than your PIN number after a pint and a half of scrumpy – a man with all the personality of a boiled potato. You could lose him in a fog and never miss him. Second Stranger: drenched, shifty-eyed, and exuding ‘definitely up to something’ vibes like a dog trying to look innocent next to a puddle of suspicious liquid: sopping wet, looking guilty as a fox in a feather boa, and twitching like a ferret with a firework up its fundament. Third Stranger: a jittery, hesitant figure who hovers in the doorway like a man who’s just remembered he left something incriminating on the stove. One foot in, one foot out, as if the very air inside the cottage might set off an alarm. He barely crosses the threshold before bolting back into the night, leaving a flurry of questions and a faint smell of panic in his wake.
The genius of Hardy here is that he’s playing the reader like a fiddle — and not a classy fiddle either, but one of those battered ones you find at the back of a pub next to a broken fruit machine and an angry-looking ferret. He leads you along thinking you know who’s who, until suddenly you’re flat on your face, with your assumptions scattered around you like a dropped shopping bag full of eggs.
Plot-wise, it’s as slippery as a buttered otter. Just when you think you’ve got it pinned down — when you’re sure that the shifty one must be the wrong’un, and the anxious runaway has guilty written all over him — bam! — Hardy wriggles away with a cheeky wink and leaves you questioning everything, including whether you’ve remembered to turn the oven off.
Beneath all the frolics, there’s a proper Hardy lesson ticking away like a bomb made of social commentary. Judging people by appearances? Not clever. Jumping to conclusions faster than a flea on a trampoline? Foolish. The villagers, bless them, wouldn’t spot a real criminal if he marched in wearing a sandwich board reading ‘I AM A DODGY CUSTOMER’ and nicked the spoons under their noses.
And my word, the setting! Hardy paints it all with his usual muddy, misty, magnificently miserable brush. You can almost feel the mildew setting into your socks as you read. The countryside broods in the background like a particularly bitter old aunt, the sort who sits in the corner at Christmas sniffing disapprovingly at everyone’s presents.
Yet despite the damp, the drink, and the dense villagers, The Three Strangers sparkles with a kind of mischievous energy that you don’t often get from Hardy — it’s like watching a stern old man try to do the limbo. And the ending! Mercy me, an actual glimmer of hope! I half-expected Hardy to jump out from behind a hedge at the last second and slap someone with a plague for good measure, but no — he lets the story end with a twinkle rather than a thud.
In short: The Three Strangers is a mad little masterpiece — like being taken on a pony ride by a particularly eccentric uncle who insists on narrating the journey in rhyme. It’s clever, cheeky, and leaves you grinning like a cat who’s just discovered where the cream is kept.
I adored it. And I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys a side of chaos with their literature — or anyone who’s ever looked at a bunch of strangers at a party and thought, one of you is definitely about to nick the silverware.
The Three Strangers is about the dangers of assumption, the slipperiness of appearances, and the absolute necessity of having a good raincoat if you live within a hundred miles of Hardy’s imagination.
It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s as slippery as an eel in a bucket of custard — and somewhere, somehow, Thomas Hardy probably was at that party, handing out beers, playing the squeeze-box, and muttering about fate being a right old bastard.
Five stars. Ten pints. A confused sheep in every parlour.
Thank you. I shall now collapse nobly onto a chaise longue, or possibly into a rhubarb patch.
Wording 