contributes to their extraordinary and thrilling immediacy [closed]
A strain of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism runs through the first four chapters of the novel and contributes to their extraordinary and thrilling immediacy.
Paraphrase
A strain (of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism) contributes to the extraordinary and thrilling immediacy of the first four chapters.
extraordinary
1a: going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraordinaryimmediate
b: being near at hand https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/immediate
I would interpret "immediate" in this context as, "up close and personal" https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/up-close-and-personal
(cross-posted with @user405662)
A strain of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism runs through the first four chapters of the novel and contributes to their extraordinary and thrilling immediacy.
A slight rephrasing, and the sentence might read—
A strain of intense female sexual fantasy and eroticism runs through the first four chapters of the novel, and this strain contributes to the extraordinary and thrilling immediacy of the first four chapters.
As is apparent from the given excerpt, the writer is talking about some novel ( possibly of the Victorian era, and I am assuming it's some novel of Hardy's) that deals, perhaps explicitly, with sex. It's to be recalled that the Victorian era was marked by prudishness and placed a taboo on even risqué references, let alone go on to provide their descriptions. With subjects such as pornography, immediacy refers to the absence of any intervening media to tone down the erotic content the writer has put in. Thus the writer is talking about the novel's remarkable and blunt portrayal of pornography in an era in which it was highly tabooed.