"Barchester Towers" by Anthony Trollope

The blurb on the back mentions Trollope's "matchless handling of plot" yet I have never known an author more prone to the spoiler! The plot such as it is revolves around the widow Bold and whether she will marry the odious Mr Slope or the feckless Bertie Stanhope or the saintly Reverend Arabin and since we are told at the end of chapter 15 (about a third of the way through) that she will marry neither Slope nor Stanhope (he excuses this spoiler by telling us that it can ruin one's enjoyment of a book if a previous reader tells you what is going to happen!!!!) we are left with the sub-plot which is will Mr Slope become Dean? Trollope spoils this too! At the beginning of Chapter 38 we are told that he has no chance to be Dean and yet Trollope wishes his characters to act as if they don't know this almost until the end of the book.

The other most obvious flaw with this book is the author's long-windedness: "Had she married Petruchio, it may be doubted whether that arch wife-tamer would have been able to keep her legs out of those garments which are presumed by men to be peculiarly unfitted for feminine use" (Ch 33) equals 'no-one was going to stop her wearing the trousers'. It's not just verbose, its verbosity obscures the meaning. The defence that he was paid by the page does not make this any higher quality as a work of art. 

The authorial voice frequently intrudes, often to discourse upon the craft of the novelist:

• "It would not be becoming were I to travestie a sermon, or even to repeat the language of it in the pages of a novel." (Ch 6)
• "Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick of cudgelling my brains to find them." (Ch 51)
• "The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums." (Ch 53)

The author would usually rather tell than show, especially when it comes to explaining the motivations of his characters.

Names are important to Trollope. Some of them are nominative determinism run rampant: Mr and Mrs Quiverful have fourteen children, the bishop is Dr Proudie, the upwards-aspiring farmer's wife is Mrs Lookaloft.

It is hard to forgive Trollope for being such a snob. "Could Mr Slope ... even have learnt the ways of a gentleman, he might have risen to great things." (Ch 8) Slope is damned by his lower class origins, and this in a novel devoted to the Church! Slope himself is snobbish, suggesting that "for people of that class [lower class people who talk funny] the cathedral service does not appear to me to be the most useful"; they are to be excluded from the cathedral (Ch 12). The centrepiece of the great garden party given by the Thornes segregates the great from the humble and Mrs Lookaloft's flouting of these rules is one of the key moments in the centrepiece. In chapter 32, Slope receives information from Mrs Bold's maid-servant and Trollope comments: "Considering the source from whence this came it was not quite so untrue as might have been expected"; in plain English the author is telling us that the lower-classes are habitual liars. 

His characters are of the Dickensian sort, in that they are colourful and memorable and delightful but they are fundamentally caricatures with no complexity. There are the goodies, such as the impossibly saintly Mr Harding and the baddies such as the oleaginous Obadiah Slope (Urian Heep in a clerical collar). There are the more nuanced such as the wordly archdeacon or Mr Arabin who over-thinks everything, or Signora Neroni, the siren who delights in seduction but is psychologically acute and able to do someone a good turn (if it won't cost her). There are the forces of nature, such as Mrs Proudie, the Bishop's wife. All of the aforementioned are leopards who will never change their spots. Only two characters suggest the possibility of change: Bertie Stanhope (the young waster who is still too honourable to take advantage of a woman) and Mrs Bold.

Unfortunately, like Dickens, Trollope finds it much more difficult to create good characters. Septimus Harding, meek and mild milk sop hero of the previous book, The Warden, in this Barsetshire series, is too good to be true; Mr Arabin, virginal Fellow of an Oxford College who throws it all up to become a little parish priest, is likewise unflawed. At least Eleanor Bold, Harding's daughter, who goes on to marry Arabin (why should I care about spoilers when Trollope doesn't?), is stubborn and headstrong, especially when she is misunderstood. But Trollope is orchestrating a morality play rather than anything more visceral.

There is a little intertextual fun. In chapter 4, Mr Slope is said to be descended from Mr Slop, the physician who was present at the birth of Tristram Shandy (by Laurence Sterne), who argues with a servant called Obadiah, and whose ancestors must (since Slop was a Roman Catholic) have at some point changed their religion. There are lots of quotes and references to other works, especially the Bible and Shakespeare but also including Homer and Marlowe.

Basically, I thought it was poorly written. The plot contains spoilers, the prose is long-winded, and the characters have no progressions, they are almost all either goodies or baddies with little mixture of strengths and weakness, and they can all be summed up in a very few words, such as Bertie, the cad with an honourable heart.

The spoiled plot is a feature of Trollope novels (eg The Eustace Diamonds, and Phineas Redux). In  chapter 12 of his 1883 Autobiography, Trollope contrasts his 'realistic' novels with the 'sensationalist' novels of Wilkie Collins. "The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot." Which would be all very well if Trollope's characters actually had character development but they don't.

But then how do I explain its huge popularity? At my reading group I was in a minority of one; the others all enjoyed the book. I think the difference was that I judged it as a novel, and they looked on it as an entertainment. They thought it gave a good description of the social issues of the time, which perhaps it does to an extent, and that it was funny. I hadn't thought of it as a comic novel. You can compare it with one of those classic BBC sitcoms such as 'Are You Being Served?' or 'Allo Allo', neither of which I liked or Fawlty Towers, which I loved. They use stock one-dimensional characters and poke fun at them. Barchester Towers is the same. It is satire and as satire, I suppose, it succeeds. But it is still too verbose and the plot is still self-sabotaged by the author. 

Selected quotes:

• "The undying fame promised to our friend was clearly intended to be posthumous." (Ch 2)
• "He understood well the value of forms, and knew that the due observance of rank could not be maintained unless the exterior trappings belonging to it were held in proper esteem." (Ch 3)
• "If honest men did not squabble for money, in this wicked world of ours, the dishonest men would get it all." (Ch 14)
• "I know no life that must be as delicious as that of a writer for newspapers ... to thunder forth accusations ... show up the worst side of everything ... pick holes in every coat, to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious ... What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing." (Ch 21)
• "A round dinner-table ... is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented." (Ch 21)
• "Everything has gone by, I believe. ... The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes." (Ch 34)
• "Steel too highly polished, edges too sharp, do not do for this world's work." (Ch 38)
• "What men choose to do at Oxford, nobody ever hears of." (Ch 47) equals 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas'.
• "It is the bane of my life that on important subjects I acquire no fixed opinion. I think, and I think, and go on thinking." (Ch 48)

Not so much a novel as an entertainment. Perhaps its popularity comes from its predictability, its cosy context conjuring up a world where nothing really bad can happen, and its comforting certainties.

Unchallenging, poorly written, overlong and boring. But really quite funny. April 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The series continues with Doctor Thorne, where I am heading next but without any expectation of more than a meander.

I have also read and reviewed Trollope's political Palliser novels:

• Can You Forgive Her? in which Alice Vavasor oscillates backwards and forwards between goody two shoes John Grey and her wicked cousin George Vavasor. This book is blessed with a humorous counterpoint as rich and merry widow Mrs Greenow oscillates between rich farmer Mr Cheesacre who repeatedly tells everyone how well to do he is and penniless chancer and fraud 'Captain' Bellfield; the funniest of the Palliser books
• Phineas Finn, Irish charmer Phineas enters parliament and seeks marriage with Violet Effingham (he fights a duel over her) or Laura Standish (who rejects him for dour Scot Mr Kennedy whom Phineas subsequently saves from muggers) whilst being pursued by a poor Irish girl from home. Phineas suffers political tribulations but the best part of the book is the sadness over Laura's marriage.
• The Eustace Diamonds, The wonderful minx Lizzie Eustace, who has married a dying man for diamonds and is determined to keep them despite legal attempts to win them back for the family, is Trollope's best character. She lies, she manipulates and she breaks the law to retian what she has convinced herself is rightfully hers.
• Phineas Redux Phineas returns, is again embroiled in woman trouble, and stands trial for murder. This should be the most exciting of the Trollope books were it not for the fact that Trollope writres his own spoilers.
• The Prime Minister Plantagent Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition but he is too concerned for his honour to be a successful leader and he struggles on the rack of his own conscience
• The Duke's Children in which Plantagenet's children do their best to make unsuitable matches. The Duke finds it hard to apply his own liberal principles to his children.