Tamara Drewe

AUTHOR: Simmonds, Posy

ARTIST: Posy Simmonds (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Jonathan Cape

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2005-2007

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2007

Publication History

Tamara Drewe and its predecessor Gemma Bovery were conceived when, after years of writing cartoons for The Guardian, author Posy Simmonds approached the editors of The Guardian with the desire to write a story with a definite ending. Tamara Drewe was originally published as a weekly cartoon strip, unfolding in 110 installments between September 17, 2005, and October 20, 2007. As the strip’s newspaper run came to an end, Simmonds collected and edited the comic, creating the story that was published as a single volume by Jonathan Cape in 2007. Like Gemma Bovery, which was based on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Tamara Drewe began as a reworking of a nineteenth-century novel, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). While first drafts adhered closely to Hardy’s plot, Simmonds began to deviate from Hardy’s novel as her story developed, making Tamara Drewe entirely her own work.

Plot

As it is modeled after Far from the Madding Crowd, Tamara Drewe tells the story of a strong, proud young woman in the country who is wooed by three suitors and goes through heartbreaking experiences, emerging in a state of relative domestic bliss at the end. However, Simmonds’s story closely represents Hardy’s in only the briefest of summaries. Simmonds’s twenty-first- century version opens at Stonefield, an idyllic writer’s retreat near Ewedown, as Nicholas Hardiman’s wife, Beth, discovers yet another of his affairs. Just as this drama comes to an end, a burglar alarm sounds at the nearby Winnards Farm, announcing the return of Tamara Drewe, who arouses the interests of everyone in the area.

Though her initial plan is to sell Winnards Farm after her mother’s death, Tamara begins to enjoy her life there and decides to write her column from the country. On a trip back to London, she encounters Ben Sergeant, the former drummer of a hip rock band; they begin a relationship, soon becoming engaged. Ben spends most of his time in the country and becomes a spectacle for Jody Long and Casey Shaw, two Ewedown teenagers who often sit in the graffitied bus shelter near Tamara’s house, waiting for opportunities to take pictures of the star with their cell phones.

On Valentine’s Day, Jody and Casey’s interest in Ben and Tamara’s relationship turns from voyeuristic to criminal when a bored Jody breaks into Winnards, accesses Tamara’s e-mail account, and sends a “valentine” to Ben, Nicholas, and Andy Cobb that reads, “I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life.” The e-mail causes a break between Tamara and Ben. Nicholas is interested, however, and he begins pursuing Tamara. Uninterested at first, Tamara eventually invites Nicholas into her bed.

Jody and Casey discover the affair. Disgusted by this infidelity, Jody presses her friend to capture proof of Tamara and Nicholas’s relationship and send it to Beth, which she does. As the entire situation approaches its breaking point, Jody sends another counterfeit e-mail from Tamara’s computer, causing Ben to return to Ewedown.

Beth confronts her husband, demanding a divorce. Though Nicholas has confessed to Tamara that he wants to leave his wife, he is infuriated by the revelation that another writer, Glen Larson, has informed Beth that Nicholas lied about how a previous affair ended. Meanwhile, Ben discovers Jody breaking into Winnards and convinces her to promise to stop meddling. During this conversation, Ben’s dog, Boss, chases some nearby cows. In their anxiety, the cattle stampede over a hill and down to where Glen and Nicholas are heatedly arguing. A shoving match ends with Nicholas falling and being trampled by the cattle.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, Jody is found dead from huffing air duster, her way of celebrating for having finally met Ben. Ewedown is barraged by television crews and reporters; the news from the village portrays Tamara as a man-eater. In her desperation, she turns to Andy, who has quietly pursued her from the beginning of the novel.

Characters

•Tamara Drewe is a young, beautiful columnist who returns to her hometown of Ewedown. Though charmed by the country, she seeks out companionship that is advantageous to her aspirations of celebrity. Her relationships with Ben and Nicholas disrupt both rural and marital tranquility, with disastrous results.

•Beth Hardiman is the plump, fiftysomething proprietor of Stonefield. She is responsible for the retreat’s effortless peace and tranquility, constantly nurturing and encouraging her husband, the writers, and everyone else by offering jobs, food, dictation, and kind words.

•Nicholas Hardiman is a successful writer of popular crime novels that fund Stonefield’s existence. He hides his deep dissatisfaction with his career and his marriage to Beth behind a facade of smug superiority and habitual womanizing.

•Andy Cobb is a self-professed “loser” and a product of the dying town of Ewedown. His parents once owned Winnards Farm, and he once owned a design studio. Bereft of both, he works for the Hardimans as a gardener and handyman during the day; by night, he drinks at the local pub and laments the influx of moneyed Londoners. He is attracted to Tamara, but she continually rejects or ignores him.

•Jody Long is a spunky but bored teenager who is determined to make “something” happen in Ewedown. Obsessed with Tamara’s boyfriend, Ben, she and her friend Casey break into Winnards Farm. Their meddling accelerates the adult dramas going on around them.

Artistic Style

The initial publication of Tamara Drewe as a weekly newspaper cartoon greatly influenced the form and content of the work. The pages are square, having been created to fit within the allotted three-column space in The Guardian. Every page is a ministory or sketch in and of itself, and most pages begin and end with a “hook”: a humorous comment, a mysterious statement, or a significant look, all meant to keep readers waiting for the next week’s installment. Limited to 110 episodes by her contract, Simmonds uses long narrative passages to develop the multiple plotlines. Traditional layouts featuring speech balloons are frequently used when a character is reminiscing or when an intimate conversation is taking place. Traditional panel layouts are often interspersed with page-long or -tall illustrations with irregular borders.

Simmonds’s artistic style is in keeping with her careful study of human relationships and reactions. Tamara Drewe’s pages are full of close-ups that emphasize facial expressions and postures. Crowd scenes such as Nicholas’s Christmas book signing are excellent portrayals of the interactions of a certain subset of literary society. However, Simmonds is also a master of settings, and many pages depict quaint, rural landscapes reminiscent of the type used by Hardy: open spaces with hills, gnarled trees, stone barns, paddocks, and cattle.

Colors in Tamara Drewe are muted, with many greens and browns used for outdoor scenes, warm oranges for scenes of domestic comfort, and gray-blues for memories. Only teenagers and gossip magazines are colored with bright reds, pinks, and yellows, seemingly indicating that anyone wearing these colors is an interloper upon the rural tranquility of Ewedown.

Themes

Taking a cue from Hardy’s novel, Tamara Drewe explores the literary theme of rural life versus urban life. The representations of and relationships between country and city found in British literature are updated and played out in a contemporary setting. Ewedown is a dying town, kept alive by rich Londoners who own vacation homes there. What Ewedown affords them is what Stonefield sells as a commodity: the tranquility and nostalgia of a supposedly simpler life. As indicated by the Drewe family’s ownership of Winnards Farm, once the property of the Cobb family, an agricultural economy has given way to one based upon a twenty-first-century version of landed gentry, who hire the local “peasantry” to do most of the work on their hobby farms. As do many of Hardy’s works, Tamara Drewe shows a rural Britain at a time of change in the interaction between rural and urban life.

Another powerful theme, one that separates Simmonds’s work from Hardy’s, is the novel’s honest portrayal of teen culture. The slow death of Ewedown particularly affects the lives of its teens, and this lack of opportunity fuels Jody’s boredom and, thus, her delinquency. Simmonds captures these adolescents’ lingo and realistically depicts Jody and Casey’s family lives, discussions of sex, worship of popular culture and its stars, and experimentation with drugs. When Beth provides Ewedown’s teens with a place to gather after Jody’s death, Simmonds seems to promote providing teens with more responsibility and more socially acceptable methods of entertainment.

Tamara Drewe is concerned with relationships between men and women, but since three of the four voices narrating the novel are female, the commentary often turns to an exploration of issues that particularly affect women. For example, Tamara’s nose job implicates standards of beauty, Beth’s nurturing actions invite discussions of domesticity versus career, and Jody and Casey’s discussions of sex often include typical judgments of female sexuality.

Impact

Though her popularity is firmly established in Britain, Simmonds is less known in the United States. With its interesting position as both a popular episodic cartoon and a revision of classic literature, Tamara Drewe does not fit any particular niche. In a literary sense, the novel takes part in the rash of popular revisions of canonical literature that has taken place in the twenty-first century. Simply by using Hardy as a source of inspiration, Simmonds includes him in her simultaneous mockery and appreciation of a whole array of literary traditions. More strictly in the world of graphic storytelling, Tamara Drewe mixes modes that carry certain stigmas or prestige (cartooning is simple or for marketing purposes; the classics are “good” literature; columnist journalism is fluffy) and by doing so lends credence to the increasing perception of graphic novels as literature.

Films

Tamara Drewe. Directed by Stephen Frears. Ruby Films, 2010. This film adaptation stars Gemma Arterton as Tamara Drewe, Dominic Cooper as Ben Sergeant, Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam as Beth and Nicholas Hardiment, Luke Evans as Andy Cobb, Bill Camp as Glen McCreavy, and Jessica Barden as Jody Long. Many of the actors bear striking resemblances to their graphic novel counterparts, and the film differs from the graphic novel only in subtle changes in plot, characterization, and names. Glen’s character is also used more often for comic relief, and he and Beth begin an affair.

Further Reading

Simmonds, Posy. Gemma Bovery (1999).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Literary Life (2003).

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Imlah, Mick. “Tamara Drewe’s Wessex.” The Times Literary Supplement, November, 2007.

Simmonds, Posy. “Posy Simmonds.” Interview by Daneet Steffens. Mslexia 37 (April/May/June, 2008). https://secure.svr9-speedyservers.com/~mslexia/magazine/interviews/interview‗37.php.