I’m no film critic. I was of the bemused pre-film studies generation who later watched Rear Window in class and didn’t get it.  I missed out on about 18 years of film because I couldn’t find a babysitter, and then there were the years living outside Dublin when all things Art House passed me by. That’s my disclaimer. But for what it’s worth, I know what I like… And more often than not I leave the cinema disappointed. Is it just me or are there really that many bad movies? Movies made from books would appear to have the odds stacked even more highly against them.

I don’t know whether film critics loved or loathed Far From the Madding Crowd, or whether it has been deemed ‘faithful’ to the book or not, but I enjoyed it. I read Hardy’s novel many years ago, and I remember feeling the same sense of disorientation. Here was a feisty, feminist heroine, but in a 19th century novel. Then there were the twists and turns, more akin to soap opera than to a contemporary novel, or contemporary film for that matter, but as with the book I decided to stop trying to fit my contemporary mindset onto it and instead to follow it where it took me.

It was published serially, Google confirms, monthly and anonymously, in a magazine called Cornhill. I wrote an episodic novel myself a few years ago, which was universally rejected for being too episodic. But why not represent a life as it unfolds, in episodes? Are we so attached to rounding off and wrapping up that we can’t do what the nineteenth century reader could? Or, if we can get our heads around the concept, why do we limit the form to soaps and tv series?

A few lines jarred because they felt too modern – ‘I’ll be there for you’ is something from Friends, as far as I’m concerned. Farmer Oak was too good to be wholesome, and I suspect his hands were soft and his nails clean. And the thud of the sheep hitting the shore was more funny than tragic. But I was willing to be lulled into a Wessex idyll, with a sympathetic heroine and a happy ending. I emerged into the’madding crowd’ of O’Connell Street, awash with drunks and junkies as is its wont that time of night, a satisfied punter.