High Praise: The Trollope Jupiter on Phineas at Bay

I'm with Missy; isn't this review of Phineas at Bay by Mark Green brilliant:

Wirenius is avowedly a fan of Trollope but it is apparent from the earliest chapters that he is an able writer and so any fears on that head are allayed. He understands the demands of plot development, building tension and the importance of character which are the basic stock in trade of the writer of fiction.

If I might consider his characters first; it is important, where established characters from previous novels are resurrected that they should be recognisable from the Trollopian incarnations. Phineas Finn, as the principal character is the most important in this respect, but so too is his wife Marie – Madame Max from the Palliser series of novels. Here Wirenius succeeds for me. His Phineas would not be out of place in Trollope’s novels. He is older, certainly – the novel is set in the last decade of the 19th century – and perhaps wiser but, importantly for those who wish to see him rediscover his youthful energy and willingness to take on an unpopular cause, he is once more something of an outsider from the establishment. He is a member of the ruling Liberal party but not a member of Barrington Erle’s cabinet. His somewhat Quixotic decision to champion the cause of the Welsh miner Ifor Powlett-Jones is in keeping with this reinvigorated character.

Marie Finn is also recognisably the character Trollope created. Her wisdom and insight are intact as is her ability to see how people will react and match her actions to the needs of the case in a way that would be an example to her husband if he were not the man he is. I found their relationship described with greater frankness than the Victorian Trollope was able to commit to the page. It was a salutary reminder that this was a couple who were not only intellectually but physically drawn to one another

****

If I have a quibble with this book it is that, unlike Trollope, whose most villainous characters were always shown to have finer qualities that gave them a rounded humanity, we are presented with an obdurate antagonist with whom Phineas must grapple. The industrialist Sir William McScuttle is vindictive in his prosecution of Ifor Powlett-Jones and uses improper subterfuge to undermine Barrington Erle in pursuit of power and to continue a vendetta against Phineas. He is painted too black and lacks the redeeming features which Trollope gave even his meanest characters. In this, perhaps, the book reflects a modern requirement for a simplified unambiguous narrative to which Trollope was not subject or could, at least, choose to ignore.

That concern aside, I found the plots worked – inasmuch as the actions of the characters which drive the plots forward are “in character”. Jack Standish is impetuous like his father was before him. Lizzie Eustace schemes and always has a weather eye on the main chance to do what is best for Lizzie. If there is sometimes a lack of the sense of inevitability about how things will go wrong that is a hallmark of Trollope (no good ever came out of a young man signing bills!) there is never implausibility. I believed in the stories as they developed and wanted to follow the developments. As a result, even though it weighs in at 500 pages, the book is a page-turner. Indeed, I did not find it long. By Trollope’s standards, of course, it isn’t – a mere two volume novel.

Sorry to borrow so much--there's lots I didn't borrow, and the reader will, I think, find the whole review of interest--but it's music to my ears. Green has other notes of praise and blame, but the overall assessment has made my day.

I will say that I wrote Phineas at Bay without the benefit of the much more nuanced depiction of Plantagenet Palliser
afforded by the finally released edition of The Duke's Children, having before me only the severely cut version published in Trollope's own lifetime. While I think my characterization of Palliser is consistent with Trollope's, I agree that the unabridged version could have led me to go deeper into his psyche. I also acknowledge that Sir William McScuttle has little to say for himself--not nothing, mind you; he's a practitioner of realpolitik who genuinely believes he's surrounded by hypocrites, and, having clawed his own way up the social ladder, is quite afraid of plummeting back down. I admit though, that he's less fully developed than he could have been. (Though I'm quite pleased with how Rev. Emilius and Lady Eustace came out, as my villains go.)

Still, how can I not be pleased with Green's conclusion:

Is it a worthy continuation of Trollope’s political novels? Does it provide Phineas with the third outing which John McCourt believes his character calls out for? I think the answer to both questions is “yes”. Wirenius has done his research on the issues which his book touches upon and his understanding of the characters he has borrowed from Trollope (I cannot speak to the borrowings from other writers which also feature as amusing asides) is evident. He has, therefore, satisfied my test of paying sufficient respect to his original source. And he has produced a story which moves quickly, more quickly than Trollope might have had it, and entertains. His writing style is clearly modern and if at times he attributes to his hero slightly anachronistic views that are ahead of his time (and out of sync with what Trollope might have given him), then I, for one, most definitely can forgive him.

What author could not be happy to read that?

Book Gloat: Brattle Book Shop Edition

Well. now that I am beginning to settle back into life, a short book gloat seems in order. Or, What Did I Buy on My Summer Vacation (Highlights Reel):

Let's begin with the best--the copyright edition of a novel of great importance ego me--



Note the beautiful design on the page ends:



And here's the title page:



As near to a true first as I ever expect to own.

We now move to a nice find from the bargain table of Brattle Book Shop in Boston:



So, um, what are they? Two linked volumes by George R. Tyrrell, they together rate a chapter )and their author a whole Part) in Alec R. Vider's 1934 study The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church. They represent Fr. Tyrrell's effort to open Roman Catholicism to new learning and new political realities. He was excommunicated for these efforts, but in many ways anticipated Vatican II.

From the bargain table also:



All three volumes of George Eliot's masterpiece, in very nice shape, thankee, and all for $5 per volume. The "Holly Lodge" edition was a complete set of Eliot's works in 24 volumes, limited to 500 copies. These were part of number 97. Alas, the rest of my Eliot's do not match. However, I now have all the big ones, though my copy of "Scenes from Clerical Life" appears to have gone walkabout.

Not from the bargain table, but irresistible for a newly ordained deacon:



All one needed to know about vestments as of 1896. Maybe I can now understand why the Church uses the amise and the apparel. (I know, wild optimism. Still the apparel at least inspired Anthony Ainley's collar as the Master in Doctor Who, so nothing is ever entirely wasted.)

One last, and you can have a break.

First, I'm a great admirer of Werner Jaeger's Paideia. So it was a great pleasure to come across this:

The Summer of Lost Literature

For all of his admitted flaws, Karl Marx was smart enough to almost say that history repeated itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."[1]

This summer poses an admirable example of the phenomenon in the literary world. It began with the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in which we had the tragedy of Atticus Finch's declining years, and were forced to question simple assumptions about the virtues of the finest Southern gentleman in literature. Now, as summer nears--well, let's not rush things, and call it the end yet, but, as Labor Day begins to hove menacingly into view, we are confronted with the return of Ayn Rand:

The movie-star heroine of Ayn Rand’s “Ideal” is a legendary, enigmatic beauty named Kay Gonda, paid a fortune by Hollywood for her work and worshiped by the faceless multitudes. Her press agent writes: “Kay Gonda does not cook her own meals or knit her own underwear. She does not play golf, adopt babies, or endow hospitals for homeless horses. She is not kind to her dear old mother — she has no dear old mother. She is not just like you and me. She never was like you and me. She’s like nothing you rotters ever dreamt of.”

In short, Kay Gonda is one of Rand’s Nietzschean protagonists — an über-frau who has fans, not friends, and who thinks that she towers above all the losers and “second-handers” who populate the world. She is also, it turns out, a close relative of Dominique Francon in the early portions of “The Fountainhead” (a character Rand once described as “myself in a bad mood”)— a pessimist radically alienated from a world she regards with disdain.

he premise of “Ideal” is that Gonda is on the run, suspected of murder and seeking refuge with a succession of fans who have written her mash notes; most turn out to be hypocrites and weaklings who pledge undying loyalty and love but betray her in her supposed hour of need.

***
The story is an ugly, diagrammatic illustration of Rand’s embrace of selfishness and elitism and her contempt for ordinary people — the unfortunate, the undistinguished, those too nice or too modest to stomp and roar like the hard man Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead.” It underscores the reasons that her work — with its celebration of defiance and narcissism, its promotion of selfishness as a philosophical stance — so often appeals to adolescents and radical free marketers. And it is also a reminder of just how much her didactic, ideological work actually has in common with the message-minded socialist realism produced in the Soviet Union, which she left in the mid-1920s and vociferously denounced.

Ah, sounds bracing, doesn't it? I remember once in college taking a course on Soviet Foreign Policy (I did this in 1987, showing that I was not prescient.) Anyway, among the works we read was a Communist Party approved treatise, which had been translated into English. It had the same stilted, purportedly welcoming tone, as it rumbled over clunky usages and improbable syntax that no human mouth ever spoke, as does Rand's dialogue. The review gives several risible examples, but my favorite occurs when Gonda is tasked with having been complicit in a young man's suicide; "she coolly says it was 'the kindest thing I have ever done.'”

That's our Ayn. A self-proclaimed philosopher who took all the paradox and irony, the wit and sarcasm, out of Nietzsche, and solemnly explicated the practical implications of his stark parables, as though they were an instruction manual.[2] Leopold and Loeb did him more credit as disciples.

NOTES:

[1] Actually, the quote is "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle."

[2] One cannot miss the opportunity to quote the great John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.