This interview occurs near the midway point of the novel, and with this the reader can guess that in the end the Duke will permit the marriage and even ask Mr. Tregear what his Christian name is. But this is a political novel. Back to business. After all, entire chapters are devoted to the maneuvers by which Sir Timothy Beeswax attempts to maintain his power with the Conservative government. Again we see politics as it is. The moves are not too complex for a Trollope novel, but they are too complex for a brief review. Suffice it to say that no government lasts forever, and the Duke is obliged to deal with political adversity. It isn't easy for him; but it is not for nothing that the Duke is one of Trollope's favorite creations.
A pleasant book. England moves on. A segment of the Liberal Party finds itself obliged to become more liberal than had been anticipated. The Palliser series comes to an end, and the readers (especially those of us who have developed a sentimental attachment to this seemingly aloof family) are entertained.
RUINS, RUIN, AND RUINED
THE MACDERMOTS OF BALLYCLORAN
I've never cared very much for junkyard photography. By this I mean rusty plows, abandoned automobiles, houses falling in, storefronts with broken glass. Of course ruins always have a certain appeal; the remains of an old well can be seen beside a trail leading down toward the river from my house. Who knows what happened around that old site? But rust and ruin have a limited appeal. Anthony Trollope encountered the ruins of an old country house on a visit to Drumsna, Ireland, in 1843, while working for the Post Office. As recorded in his autobiography, "It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited … and while I was still among the ruined walls and decayed beams I fabricated the plot of The Macdermots of Ballycloran." The story that resulted from this visit might do very well to pass away a dull afternoon riding through the country; but I found the leisurely pace of the six hundred page novel tedious. Ruins, ruin, and ruined.
This was Trollope's first novel. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had been in Ireland five years, traveling through the countryside as a clerk to a postal surveyor. One of the primary rules for writers is to write about what one knows about, and he did that. But he would have never survived as an author on forty-six more such novels. Over the next decade he was to write two more rather indifferent novels and then begin The Warden, the first of the Barsetshire novels and predecessor to Barchester Towers, his best known work. It's one thing for a writer to have the requisite skills; it's another thing—whether by chance or design—to hit upon a subject or a character that will "take off." Writers are sometimes surprised by what the public likes and what it doesn't. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looked upon Sherlock Holmes as a distraction from his higher calling as a writer of historical novels, until he realized that Holmes was his meal ticket. Few readers know anything about his historical novels. And for Trollope, the worlds of Barchester Towers and the Pallisers secured his place in English literature.
But back to the dreary world of the Macdermots. First, be warned that their story, which doesn't start very well, doesn't end well, either, as a visitor to the ruins of their country house might suspect. Larry Macdermot, reigning patriarch, is on the verge of losing his house, his property and his mind. His daughter Feemy is seduced by the English revenue agent. Larry's son Thady, the central focus of the story, has a violent encounter with Feemy's lover when she is reluctant to elope with him. It's an unhappy time for the clan.
It wasn't a happy time for Ireland, either, and the great potato famine hadn't even started yet. The English of that day were not very interested in reading about the details of daily life of the people whom they were oppressing. Trollope, on the other hand, was a young man just beginning to achieve some success and self-confidence in his voluntary exile to serve among these impoverished people. He used his skills to portray them with accuracy and even with sympathy, even though he was a loyal son of England and man of his times and felt no obligation to accord them any more than token respect. Describing Father Cullen, he writes, "He felt towards Keegan all the abhorrence which a very bigoted and ignorant Roman Catholic could feel towards a Protestant convert." An accurate account, perhaps, but could such a frank sentence be written today?
The plot is well laid out, and the story is well told, but the reader is required to plow through the Irish dialect—"'Yer honer won't be afther taking an innocent boy like me,' began Tim, 'that knows nothing at all at all about it.'" This is fair enough—the reader knows he's reading about a different country in a different century—but it does take a bit of adjustment.