Reviews

The American Senator by Anthony Trollope

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nnjack68's review against another edition

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funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.5

schopflin's review against another edition

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funny informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I wasn't sure how much I would like a book where so much of the content was given to discussing fox hunting and English manners, as those haven't been my favourite bits of other Trollopes. But I really enjoyed them this time - there's something wonderful in how silly he makes hunting sound despite his own love of it. And other aspects of this book were wonderful - Arabella Trefoil is a great character and characterisation of how few options were open to women of her class and dreadful parenting. I think the early part of Mary Masters' romance was undercharacterised but it was very sweet later.

Content Warnings

duffypratt's review against another edition

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4.0

I bumped this to four stars from three. I've read all of Trollope. It took many years. When I ranked his books when I first signed up for Goodreads, I had only vague recollections about some of them. I started reading him when I was in my twenties because I was looking for an author who wrote lots of fat books where pretty much nothing happened. He quickly became one of my very favorite writers, especially in the big books told by his charming narrator.

To be fair, this book is mediocre Trollope. But mediocre Trollope is still very, very good. It interweaves three plots that center around a rural area named Diillsborough. It should probably have been named Dullsborough. First, there is a love triangle among the moderately well off class - a working farmer, a younger son who just barely has enough to maintain a life of leisure, and the daughter of a struggling attorney. This story is quite thin, and it involves a plot that Trollope retread many times. A good girl is admired by a man quite suitable for her, but she doesn't love him. Everyone tries to push her into the marriage, but she refuses to yield. Secretly, her heart belongs to another.

Second, and quite more biting, are the efforts of Arabella Trefoil, a beautiful and heartless social climber. She starts the book engaged to one fairly wealthy, but dull man (who is the elder son of the gentleman involved in plot number one). But she soon sets her sights higher, and tries to catch a Lord while keeping open her options on the first engagement. Bella is a great character. The Lord she tries to catch is weak willed, a bit slimy in his dealings with women, and a liar. It's pretty clear from the start that he will escape from Bella. It's less clear whether this was the best thing, either for him or her.

The remaining plot is probably the weakest part of the book. It involves the American Senator and his observations about English country life. Trollope has the Senator introduced to this by trying to get him to understand the values of fox hunting. This plot involves some people who laid poison in a wood to kill either some foxes or hounds. One suspect has shown resentment over the hunters trampling his crops, and foxes eating his livestock. The Senator comes to his defense. This plot is by far the thinnest of the three, and the Senator is pretty much a one-dimensional boor, who happens to also be fairly intelligent. On the plus side, the fox hunting gives a great parallel to Arabella's hunt for the Lord, and Trollope handles the comparison very nicely, without being too blunt.

ergative's review

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4.25

This was a classic Trollope novel: young women looking for husbands, a Good Girl set as a foil to a quite Becky Sharp-like Bad Girl, various estates and inheritances and lawsuits; and rather more than usual amounts of fox-hunting, even for Trollope. (Indeed,almost every plot point is explored through the structure of a fox hunt.) Thematically, it held together nicely. The Good Girl, Mary Masters, behaves herself as a paragon of female virtue, steadfastly refusing a perfectly nice but slightly vulgar young man with money but little class, because her heart is set on a much more gentlemanly suitor. But, of course, she says nothing because a lady never says anything until a gentleman asks her formally. It's all rather dull, but, fortunately, Trollope livens things up by providing Arabella Trefoil, the Bad Girl. Arabella is all about getting herself a man. She joins us already engaged to one man, but throughout the course of the book we follow her attempts to trade up for a better option, and although she no doubt behaves very badly to her fiance, her character arc evoked an unavoidable sympathy. I don't know if Trollope intended for it to be sympathetic, but given the limitations on women in her position to build a future for themselves, the fact that Arabella is already 30, with rapidly fading attractions, having mastered the art of making herself pleasing and alluring with a businesslike focus, seems not so much a cause for disgust (as Trollope seems to hint) as for pity. The poor woman! This is what she must do with her youth to ward off poverty in middle age! Yes, she is engaged, finally, at the beginning of the book, but she doesn't love the man she is engaged to, and she doesn't have the luxury of waiting to marry for love, as Mary Masters does. Why shouldn't she try to level up? Her shenanigans and boundlessly energetic activities to pull off the better marriage she set her sights on were some of the most entertaining parts of the book, and the eventual fate of both her and her chosen target at the end suggest that Trollope did view her with a certain degree of softness, despite her undeniably bad behavior. I think he does recognize the constraints that bound women of his time and although he can't explicitly condone Arabella's behavior, he can show us how these constraints straiten her options and lead her to behave as she does. Furthermore, her efforts are thematically well aligned with all the fox-hunting the serves as the favorite activity of the various young men involved in Mary and Arabella's matrimonial quests. The men hunt the foxes, and Arabella hunts the men. Nicely done.

The other notable part of this book involved the eponymous American Senator, Mr Gotobed, from the Great Western State of Mickewa. His role is to wander around the events of the plot and make extremely pointed comments about every institution he encounters. You mean clergymen who are responsible for people's souls can just buy a living,or have one bought for them by rich fathers, regardless of merit? You mean this electoral borough chooses its 'representative' in parliament on the basis of what the local lord wants? You call that democracy? You mean that fox hunts can just trample across farmers' lands and destroy their crops and fences and property and the farmers have no recourse? What is wrong with you people? I have noted before that Trollope is particularly interested in institutions--the church is discussed in great length in the Barsetshire novels, and parliament in the Palliser novels--but usually he explores them through the medium of fiction. This book offers a much more explicit commentary on their flaws in the mouth of Mr Gotobed. It would almost be didactic, if not for the fact that we get to see everyone's reactions to Mr Gotobed's remarks, which are extremely funny, and in themselves a commentary on British self-image. These bits of the book are not perhaps as well-integrated thematically with the other plot elements, but I really enjoyed seeing Trollope let loose on the absurdities of English society, politics, and culture.

richardr's review against another edition

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I tend to think of Trollope as one of the most conservative of Victorian writers and a novel where fox hunting is central to the development of the narrative may be a particular case in point. Much of the plot concerns the unfavourable depictions of the titular American Senator's observations of English society, particular his criticism of how the English aristocracy are able to literally ride roughshod over the land of their neighbours when hunting: "The fact is, Mr. Morton, that the spirit of conservatism in this country is so strong that you cannot bear to part with a shred of the barbarism of the middle ages. .. You can do many things that your mother and grandmother couldn't do; but absolute freedom,—what you may call universal suffrage,—hasn't come yet, I fear."

In practice, Trollope goes to great lengths to suggest that the man the Senator is defending against a charge of fox poisoning is a rogue and that the Senator's view of English society is accordingly profoundly mistaken, with his criticism of the exclusion of much of the population from the franchise implied to be in the same vein. By the end of the novel, Trollope finds the Senator "when we last heard of him was thundering in the Senate against certain practices on the part of his own country which he thought to be unjust to other nations. Don Quixote was not more just than the Senator, or more philanthropic,—nor perhaps more apt to wage war against the windmills." It's a view that might have seemed eminently reasonably at a point when England had been stable and prosperous for generations while the United States had only narrowly survived a civil way a decade earlier.

The rest of the novel concerns two parallel plots. As is often the case in Trollope, they both tend in opposing directions. In one, Mary Masters is able to marry into the aristocracy through her unassuming and self-sacrificing nature. In another, Arabella Trefoil's schemes to marry a rich husband mark her as an adventuress and all her devices come to nothing. What is perhaps particularly interesting about this is that Arabella perhaps particularly resembles male characters in some of Trollope's other novels, with her pursuit of wealth being particularly wrong-footed because of her sex. One of the other characters describes her thus: "But it was the look of age, and the almost masculine strength of the lower face."