The Hamlet - William Faulkner

Divided into 4 parts and reworked from a number of short-stories written by the author dating right back to the 1920s, The Hamlet covers the arrival of the Snopes clan into Frenchman’s Bend and how Flem Snopes becomes a force to be reckoned with in Faulkner’s Yokanaptawpha County.

The Hamlet is a difficult book to read, and not just in the usual manner of Faulkner’s labyrinthic syntax and flowing poetic prose - though it is certainly often difficult here to tell one member of the Snopes clan from another, just as much as it is following exactly what is going on for long periods at a time. What is difficult rather is how different it all seems from the mythology of other Faulkner novels, lacking the familiar historical references to the Civil War, to Colonel Sartoris, the Compsons or the Sutpens.

With The Hamlet (continued in The Town and The Mansion), we see rather the seeds of another generation forming – not a separate one, as the Snopes crop up now again in other Faulkner novels, but one that tucked away in Frenchman’s Bend has little interest in Jefferson society, and with whom family ancestry and name no longer carry weight and influence. The old world is changing and the Snopes represent a new breed, paving the way for a more mercenary world, where it is every man for himself, a new generation that is quick to enter into litigation or quick to pull a trigger to see justice done.