Finally, another update on the Trollope project. I finished his second novel,
The Kellys and the O'Kellys, a couple months ago.
It's difficult to believe that this is only his second novel. His first novel,
The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, is okay, but seems much more obviously the work of a beginner. If that were all he had written, we would never had heard of him. (Actually, if he had only written these two, he would also be forgotten, no doubt, but anyone reading the second novel might think that it's a shame such a good Victorian writer hadn't written more.)
The Kellys uses the double plot technique, and is full of the great characters I associate with Trollope. That great Victorian topic, the puzzling relationship between economic and romantic interests in marriage, is explored explicitly and fully.
This description of Lord Cashel reminded me of the depiction of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Dicken's
Bleak House:
As my lord went from breakfast-room to book-room, from book-room to dressing-room, and from dressing-room to book-room, his footsteps creaked with a sound more deadly than that of a death-watch. The book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books seemd to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the silent solemnity of his inertia.
Lord Cashel is dull, but the novel is not. Now, on to
La Vendee.
