Creepy-Crawley pace: A review of Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset.
Anthony Trollope: The Last Chronicle of Barset (The World's Classics [Oxford University Press], 1986 reprint [original publication date: 1867, in two volumes; published serially in sixpenny monthly numbers by George Smith from 1 December 1866 to 6 July 1867]; edited, with an introduction and endnotes by Stephen Gill; ISBN: 0-19-281544-X; 920 pps.)
The Last Chronicle of Barset is the mondo-mega-long (891 pps. for the novel proper) sixth and concluding book in Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles series, which poked gentle fun at the social foibles and pretensions of the largely rural clergy of the fictional county of Barsetshire; it could easily have been a couple hundred pages shorter without sacrificing anything except Trollope's self-conscious pretentiousness at wrapping up such a sizable chunk of his literary output (although his politically-themed Palliser series would prove even longer).
TLCoB's main theme is pride (a theme also explored in He Knew He Was Right [1869]), which is sounded in its major key in the story of the penurious and arrogant, over-educated perpetual curate of Hogglestock, Josiah Crawley (who served as an unwelcome conscience to the young and unwontedly successful cleric Mark Robarts in the fourth novel of the series, Framley Parsonage), who finds himself accused of stealing a cheque for £20 (worth at least six times that amount in 2007 money); the matter proves especially thorny when he is unable to remember how he obtained it, how long he had it, or how he disposed of it. The bishop's wife, the Low Church Sabbatarian Mrs. Proudie (who had such a memorable part in the second book of the series, Barchester Towers), seizes upon this scandal as an opportunity to drive a High Church opponent to his knees, if not out of the (Anglican) Church entirely, and dragoons her reluctant husband into convening a formal ecclesiastical court proceeding against Crawley even before the secular court has rendered its verdict.
While the affair of the cheque may seem to a modern reader a tempest in a teapot, it illuminates a deadly serious problem, to wit: how some clerics in the Church of England were paid handsomely for what were often treated as sinecures and others were weren't given enough to live on, let alone keep up the appearances that the Church expected of its clergy. Crawley is paid a shamefully niggardly wage (£130 per annum, plus a meagre house: not enough to support a gentleman curate with a wife and three children in the England of the early-to-mid 1860s), and depends on various merchants extending him lines of credit to keep his family in bare necessities; little wonder then that he is jealous of his old friend Francis Arabin (one of the protagonists of Barchester Towers) having been comfortably placed as the dean of Barchester, and married to a widow with a tidy sum of money of her own besides. Trollope himself was ambivalent on this issue: while he deplored that good men should be in situations like Crawley's, he was rather fond of the gentleman cleric who was equally at home at the card table, with the hounds, or enjoying a fine brandy or port and cigars after dinner in a postprandial, men-only conclave. Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly can be seen as Trollope's particular avatar here, as his conflict with his son Henry mirrors, in a way, Trollope's conflicts with his own two sons, who were reaching the age of majority at this time (see Richard Mullen and James Munson, The Penguin Companion to Trollope [1996; ISBN: 0-14-023558-2], p. 277); on the other hand, Crawley shared certain traits -- and financial straits -- with Trollope's own father (Mullen and Munson, p. 275).
Subplots depicting minor (and often comic) permutations of pride involve the wooing of Crawley's eldest daughter Grace by the widower son of Archdeacon Grantly (who is a staunch High Church opponent of Mrs. Proudie and her allies), Major Henry Grantly; the row between Archdeacon Grantly and his son, largely over a refusal to communicate on the matter of Grace (oooh, symbolism!); the continued wooing of Lily Dale by Johnny Eames (a continuation of a major plot from the fifth book, The Small House at Allington); Eames' flirtation with an adventuress, Madolina Demolines, and twitting of his boorish boss in the civil service, Sir Raffle Buffle; and Eames' scapegrace artist friend Conway Dalrymple and his simultaneous flirtations with the heiress Clara Van Siever and the wife of an alcoholic financier, Dobbs Broughton. A sentimental supporting role is given to the very aged star of the first book, The Warden, the Rev. Septimus Harding, father-in-law to both Archdeacon Grantly and Dean Arabin, who epitomizes the cardinal virtues of the Church in particular and Christianity in general.
While there are many fine, even comic, scenes to be found here, TLCoB takes entirely too long to finish, even by Trollope's casual, "triple-decker" standards. The book drags on for over a hundred pages after the Crawley plot is finally resolved; the leave-takings are as excruciatingly interminable as those of the final Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King. (It took me over three months to read the last 90 pages -- and I liked this book and the series as a whole. Caveat lector.) If all the dangling plot threads aren't resolved entirely to the reader's satisfaction, things for the most part end well rather than otherwise: time will doubtless dull the edges of the bouts of torpor encountered while actually reading this volume, leaving a mostly roseate glow to warm one's memory.