Prime Minister (Hardcover)

The most intriguing part of the book, though, are the sections that deal with Ferdinand Lopez, a Jewish "outsider" to upper class London society, toward whom Trollope seems to have had a fascinatingly unsettled and ambivalent attitude. Is he a tragic figure whose relatively small-scale vices only bring about his downfall because he is trying to gain entry into a self-enclosed world of unearned privilege, or is he really the unscrupulous "adventurer" that the other characters all regard him as being? The fact that the author himself never really seems to have made up his own mind on this topic is perhaps a weakness in some sense, but it shows that Trollope was able to retain at least some of his intellectual honesty as the curious, inquisitive liberalism of his youth began to give way to the slightly paranoid toryism of his old age.

But this, the chief interest of the novel for me, is doomed to feel weirdly flat and over-detailed to a reader who comes to THE PRIME MINISTER cold. Phineas and Marie, Lord Cantrip, Mr Monk, Gatherum and the Duke of St Bungay will seem only ciphers to readers knowing nothing of their histories, and they may even think the Pallisers themselves unworthy of the attention devoted to them. For them the chief interest of the novel will be the Lopez-Wharton plot, which has plenty of dazzle and drive to sustain it -- but when Lopez is dispatched they may find themselves frustrated and at sea, with a book in their hands that is no longer the book they thought they were reading. Emily Lopez thereafter is not good company, perhaps not a false creation so much as one we see about 30 pages too much of.

The technical presentation of the novel is very fine. Trollope loves characters and situations, those are where his genius is most on display, and sometimes seems to regard plot as a necessary evil. Too often, elsewhere, he commits himself to subplots that canot really engage his interest, seemingly for no better reason than that is how novel-writing was supposed to be done. But here there are only two plots, with the marvelous Ferdinand Lopez serving as the hinge between them. (Trollope may have taught himself to do this in THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, where Felix Carbury serves a similar purpose.) The simplicity of the structure allows Trollope to do what he does best -- planning, rather than plotting, vivid scenes of intensity and character collision. The incidents of THE PRIME MINISTER are planned with a wonderful intelligence.

(My edition of the Palliser novels is not the Penguin but the Oxford World's Classics one, and I don't have a word to say in its favor. The notes are annoyingly overlong and too numerous; and the editors' introductions, with the exception of that to PHINEAS REDUX, are dumbfoundingly irrelevant, seeming not to have even the simplest grasp of the virtues and appeal of the work being introduced. They're like reading a disquisition by Plantagenet Palliser himself on the merits of decimal coinage.)