Book: Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (1857)

One of my first reviews on Nifty Rictus was of Anthony Trollope's The Warden. I recently had the mixed pleasure of reading its sequel, Barchester Towers--the second in the six-novel Chronicles of Barsetshire series--with an informal Victorian Fiction reading group, so it seems only appropriate that I post some thoughts on it.

The first half of Barchester Towers feels familiar. We're reintroduced to Septimus Harding, his daughter Eleanor, his son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly, and an expanded cast of characters that includes many of the minor players in The Warden. In fact, the set up is almost like an extended remix of The Warden: without giving too much away, Eleanor is once again a desirable single woman, and Mr. Harding is once again in a position where he can be tortured by the ethical implications of accepting a controversial clerical appointment.

Stylistically, the early parts of Barchester Towers show us an author who is unable to control one of the most horrible habits of nineteenth-century novelists, a habit that I'm convinced Trollope picked up from Thackeray: the mock-epic tone. Instead of giving straightforward descriptions of, say, a dinner party, Trollope endlessly ridicules his characters by comparing their every act to some heroic deed the act doesn't remotely resemble. While this is supposed to amuse us, it is clumsy and overused here, and it feels juvenile.

The second half of the book picks up substantially. The mock-epic treatment drops away as Trollope grows emotionally invested in the complex tangle of his characters' personal and professional lives. (Even this pattern of mock epic giving way to more sophisticated seriousness feels Thackerayan--I have almost exactly the same experience reading Vanity Fair.) Best of all, Eleanor goes from a daddy-loving cipher to a stubborn and realistic character--a welcome change that makes the novel's emotional climax all the more touching and satisfying.

Still, it's a bit of a slog to get there. Trollope's sketches of characters like the Thornes and the Stanhopes are brilliant throughout--the Stanhopes, our group decided, are straight out of a Wes Anderson film--but the author stumbles in his early attempts to put them into action. If you can wade through that (or if you chortle every time a dinner comment is compared to volley of arrows), it's a worthy read. Otherwise, I might pick up something else...maybe even (as I'll discuss in another post) Trollope's Autobiography.

Book: The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)

The Warden was my first Trollope. It was--as its recommender explained to me--like a warm cup of tea. It wasn't very intense, but it was sort of soothing in its mild way, and I could see Trollope turning into a calming pre-bedtime ritual. This particular novel is about a kind-hearted old clergyman who finds himself in the center of a scandal about misappropriation of funds. The man who hopes to oust the warden is, in a romantic twist, also in love with his daughter.

The chief attractions of The Warden are its length--it's that rarity among the Victorians, a short novel--and the relative complexity of its politics. Trollope has a couple of tirades about nineteenth-century reformers in here, directed at progressive newspapers (The Times, dubbed "The Thunderer"), Thomas Carlyle ("Dr. Pessimist Anticant"), and Charles Dickens ("Mr. Popular Sentiment"). Those are amusing to anyone "in the know" about the nineteenth century, but more broadly speaking, these attacks are signs that Trollope cared about the motivations and effects of high-minded political reforms on various lives. He hesitated, in other words, to embrace reform in any simplistic manner. That leaves him open to criticism that he supported the evils of politics-as-usual, but it also means he portrays politics in ways that feel refreshingly three-dimensional.

One drawback of this approach is that there aren't a lot of those "point-and-laugh" moments you get with traditional satire. It isn't, in other words, "fun." There's no exciting crusading here, and no easy right-and-wrong, so the emotional tenor of the novel is smooth and steady instead of compelling. The satire that's left often takes that eighteenth-century form of giving characters unrealistic but revealing names (see above)--the rash reformer's name is "Bold," for example. And while the characters are more complex than their names, they're still sketchily drawn. (The politics may have three dimensions, but the characters mostly have two.) There's little psychological exploration here, but the characters' thinness helps the novel remain slim.

In short, this one is probably for enthusiasts, or for people who have to squeeze in a quick nineteenth-century novel--I can imagine it working in a Victorian Fiction survey. Personally, I took it in poolside, which fit nicely with its untaxing nature.

Vocablog: peculation

peculation, n.

Taking money that is being held in trust for another; embezzlement.

(Found in Anthony Trollope's The Warden.)

Usage Example: Everyone thought Bernie Madoff was engaged in financial speculation, but not peculation.