Anthony Trollope’s is not a name
that is very widely known outside of aficionados of Victorian Literature. For a
man with a prodigious output (his bibliography has its own page, here,
and a lot of books are the size of bricks) who was commercially very successful
in his time, this is surprising. Many of his contemporaries survived the
ravages of time rather more successfully. I suspect it might be that Trollope’s
genre – political intrigue – was more topical than the more universal themes of
Dickens and Hardy, and for that reason might not be held as relevant today as
he was in his day.
Be that as it may, I found myself
approaching Can You Forgive Her with
a hint of trepidation. For one thing, the title sounded too much like something
Ravinder Singh or Durjoy Dutta might come up with, for another, it was huge.
Like, 848 pages huge.
Surprisingly, its length hangs
lightly on the story. Once I started reading, I realised the Trollope’s style
is fairly simple and conversational, with the only difficult words being the
ones peculiar to that period in terms of dressing and politics. If anything,
this style can get too conversational
when Trollope engages in author-monologues of a sort, breaking the fourth wall
and talking directly to us, as readers. (Well, given the title, in which the You of Can You Forgive Her is the reader, that’s to be expected.)
CYFH deals primarily with the love-life
of Alice Vavasor, a twenty-five year
old girl of moderate fortune but high birth who is connected by birth to some
of the highest nobility in the UK. It begins with Alice having recently become
engaged to the respected country gentleman John
Grey, after having broken her prior engagement with her first cousin, George Vavasor, heir to the Vavasor
family estate. However, Alice has doubts regarding Grey, occasioned partly by a
lingering fondness of her cousin George and partly by a revulsion for Grey’s lack
of ambition and his contentment in living quietly in Cambridgeshire. How she
conducts herself, and deals with pressure from her aunt Lady MacLeod and her father John
Vavasor, who dearly want her to marry Grey, and from her cousin Kate, sister of George, who wants her
to marry her brother, constitutes one of the two major threads of the story.
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| Alice in her little house in Queen Anne street |
The other is the married life of
Alice’s maternal (and much more aristocratic) cousin, Lady Glencora M’Cluskie, an heiress of fabulous wealth who had been
induced by family pressure to reject the handsome but worthless Burgo Fitzgerald in favour of the
rising star of British politics – Plantaganet
Palliser. Glencora’s youthfulness, her worry at being unable to provide the
House of Palliser with an heir, and her never-extinguished love for Fitzgerald
are a sharp contrast to the mature, industrious, hard-working and tepidly
affectionate Palliser. Alice becomes the only friend Glencora has, and for
better or worse, has to be her mercurial cousin’s conscience-keeper.
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| Lady Glencora and Mr Palliser |
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| Mrs Greenow and her suitors (C) Getty Images |
Through dialogues and letters and
conversations in grand drawing rooms, outdoor dinner-parties and dingy lawyer’s
chambers, Trollope tells a story both of moral dilemmas as well as of political
upheavals, and the sordid nature of electioneering of the time is rather
reminiscent of our own country’s modern elections. A candidate must be prepared
to spend money, take up causes he has little belief in and befriend shady
tavern-keepers.
In painting social scenes and in
dialogues, Trollope shows a deft and sure hand. His characters are well-drawn, and
the female characters are placed definitely at the centre of what is a
political novel as well as a social one. It would even pass the Tibett Test
rather comfortably. I did find the author monologues to be few too many to make
for really smooth reading, though, and hope the later novels in the series will
have a little less of that.
In his use of sarcastic humour and
wry ironies in depiction of some characters (Alice’s father is absolutely appalled that the government expects him
to work for his living; Ms Greenow insists her husband has been dead nine months
when it’s been barely six…) Trollope recalls Dickens, but the setting and the
story is distinctly his own. A chapter on a foxhunt is a perfect depiction of a
rural countryside and the activity itself, Alice’s time at the Palliser home
brings out the dilemma of a proud woman placed among those who are much richer
than her for an extended period of time, and in George and Fitzgerald, as
opposed to John Grey and Mr Palliser, Trollope gives us a very interesting
spectrum of male personalities.
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| The Foxhunt |
CYFH
lacks the massive
disasters and stunning co-incidences that characterise Dickens’ work, or the
sensationalism with which Dumas approached royal intrigue, but there is a healthy dose of moral dilemma instead. The
proceedings are more serene than sensational, and the result is more a
slow-cooked, delicately-spiced continental dish than the brilliant explosion of
flavours which the two authors I mentioned earlier in this paragraph served up, and yet it remains eminently enjoyable.
Can
You Forgive Her was
the first-written of what would come to be known as the Palliser series, and I can definitely say that it is good enough to
make me want to read the next book – Phineas
Finn, as soon as possible.
TL;DR:
Not a typical
Victorian romance, but definitely an exploration of that momentous time in
history, I would say it is worth a reader trying to find it if she can, in her
mind, find it possible to forgive her.
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| Alice and John Grey (c) Getty Images |
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