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A review by chiaroscuro
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
4.0
On top of my normal reading, every month, for the foreseeable future, I will be tackling a truly mammoth book. I am more stubborn than I am cowardly, and so whilst I have mostly shied away from 700+ page books in the past, broadcasting this project to the internet is a surefire way for me to read the damned things. January 2019's pick is Anthony Trollope's [b: The Way We Live Now|149785|The Way We Live Now|Anthony Trollope|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453026230s/149785.jpg|2152551], because I've been circling around this author for months and what better way to get a feel for him than by jumping into his longest work?
I don't pretend to know or care for Trollope's intentions, so I'll begin by throwing down the gauntlet and declaring that I dislike pretty much everyone in this. They are all either stupid, dull, weak or awful — though not always limited to one of these faults — and I felt the horrible feeling of an armchair worldliness settling on my shoulders as I read about their life's troubles. It all seemed to me that everyone was very foolish and lacked good sense, which I the reader had in spades. I could see that Lady Carbury, poor dear, was quite frankly a idiot. Marie was making a terrible mistake by pinning her finite ideas of romance on that terrible young man who clearly felt nothing for her. If Lord Nidderdale didn't drop his ridiculous upper class awkwardness over matters of the heart then, quoth The Beatles, he was gonna lose that girl. And helplessly I watched as these little people ran around and made the only decisions they knew how, and consequently suffered or were rewarded based on literary economics of punishing the bad for being bad, and occasionally the good because it was necessary.
I should mention that I am being slightly ironic. I think that perhaps this is the point: that Trollope has his characters act in limited and often foolish ways because that is all that is available to them — and we are to sneer, laugh or sympathise as we see fit. He immerses the reader in this strict Victorian world so strongly that its narrowness does not require a mention. Through the characters actions, the reader sees that there is nothing to do but marry, travel the Continent, or die. These people live in cages through which we are invited to inspect them.
I'll make my point more explicit. Let's take women, for example, and let's take the provincial girl Ruby Ruggles. She doesn't want to marry embarrassingly devoted local farmer John Crumb, and as a teenage girl myself I can hardly blame her. She prefers the beautiful and way above her station Sir Felix, but everyone and their mother knows that the chances of that scoundrel marrying her are fewer than me writing a review without sarcasm. John Crumb is the best thing for her — so agrees the odious American lady Mrs Hurtle, the narrator, and even - reluctantly - me. Ruby should do the sensible thing, put all absurd fantasies of Sir Felix out of her head and content herself with John Crumb, who really is not so bad.In fact, she does, and is rather happy. But this is my pressure point which Trollope has merrily whacked, so on impulse I have to demand: is this all? All women's stories are? The question of which man they should marry? Really, then, it's a story about men. You might think I'm being a young liberal snowflake, but every single female character in this ends up married. Clearly something is at work here which the reader is obliged to tug at.
I'm not making a great feminist criticism of Trollope: I am sure he did think women were for more than just marriage. I am pointing out how shit life is for women in this era, and using the example of Ruby (+ my rage at her fate) to illustrate what I mean by Trollope's style. Our response makes up half the story; it is the emotions we experience as readers which complete Trollope's meaning. Sure, Ruby might be reconciled to her fate and even find herself happy, but I am not. The gap between reader and novel is huge because Trollope's narrator, unlike George Eliot's, hardly talks to the reader. My dissatisfaction at Ruby's fate is in some ways a part of the narrative: because although the narrator never explicitly tells the reader that Ruby has a kind of shit time of it, the irony with which the novel presents her fatethe chapter in which she marries John Crumb is called 'John Crumb's Victory' leaves a gulf for the reader to fill in the rest. Which I have — with anger.
Another example, higher up the social scale, is that silly, untalented Lady Carbury is eventually persuaded into giving up her literary ambitions.She marries and takes on 'a career enough for any woman to be the wife of [a respected newspaper editor], to receive his friends, and to shine with his reflected glory'. I am the last person in the world to argue that Lady Carbury deserves success because she tries really hard; it is the meritorious who deserve literary success and there will be no sympathy cards. But somehow Trollope has, in delivering a happy ending, managed to make it even more bitter than if Lady Carbury had tried to be a successful writer forevermore — or at least I feel that way. 'To shine with his reflected glory' indeed. It's the same thing that Ruby does: these women sacrifice their pride to content themselves with a second choice. The real kick in the teeth is that the one woman who would have be really happy with her second option Lord Nidderdale, a fairly decent man who's even fallen in love with her , Marie Melmotte, instead chooses an absurd third option FISKER??! what the — and sails off to the New World.
For all that shining with reflected glory though, the narrator does inform us that she's much more popular as Mrs Broune than she ever was as Lady Carbury. So really, what does Trollope mean? He has the foresight to mock his own irony in a passage about a journalist commenting on the Mexican Railway (the journalist manages to both praise and discredit the railway, so whether the railway is a failure or success, either way he will be able to point to his article and say that he predicted the outcome all along). But then again, with all these layers of irony clouding the picture, does his mockery actually mean praise? Maybe I've got it all wrong! Doesn't Ruby — irritating, prissy, insolent Ruby — deserve to have a loving, rustic oaf for a husband?
Generally the men have a better time of it, but there's Lord Nidderdale's tragedy of the stiff upper lip, Roger Carbury's tragedy of being old, fusty and saddled with a cheerleader detrimental to his cause, and Sir Felix's general misfortune of being himself. And I shall let other reviews dwell on Augustus Melmotte, because although he is in many ways the heart of this novel I find him unbearably dull.
There's a kind of comfort to reading a Victorian novel. Not that they are predictable, exactly, but altogether things end up as they should — or if they don't, it is for reasons of poignancy. Paul Montague earned his romantic happiness when he showed some character in the matter of the Mexican Railway earlier in the novel. It was easy to tell that John Crumb would probably be alright — his surname is so bad it repels all other misfortune, else Trollope would be risking a melodrama. Some might call this melodramatic: it takes a hundred chapters for the young lovers unite, the middle-aged (but still beautiful) lady to find domestic bliss, the selfish young man to be shuffled off to Germany with a clergyman's family and the damned scoundrel to be entirely ruined. But with what excellent plot and pacing is this executed! And what an even spread of irony there is to make this rather conventional story a sharp and brilliant satire of society and manners.
I don't pretend to know or care for Trollope's intentions, so I'll begin by throwing down the gauntlet and declaring that I dislike pretty much everyone in this. They are all either stupid, dull, weak or awful — though not always limited to one of these faults — and I felt the horrible feeling of an armchair worldliness settling on my shoulders as I read about their life's troubles. It all seemed to me that everyone was very foolish and lacked good sense, which I the reader had in spades. I could see that Lady Carbury, poor dear, was quite frankly a idiot. Marie was making a terrible mistake by pinning her finite ideas of romance on that terrible young man who clearly felt nothing for her. If Lord Nidderdale didn't drop his ridiculous upper class awkwardness over matters of the heart then, quoth The Beatles, he was gonna lose that girl. And helplessly I watched as these little people ran around and made the only decisions they knew how, and consequently suffered or were rewarded based on literary economics of punishing the bad for being bad, and occasionally the good because it was necessary.
I should mention that I am being slightly ironic. I think that perhaps this is the point: that Trollope has his characters act in limited and often foolish ways because that is all that is available to them — and we are to sneer, laugh or sympathise as we see fit. He immerses the reader in this strict Victorian world so strongly that its narrowness does not require a mention. Through the characters actions, the reader sees that there is nothing to do but marry, travel the Continent, or die. These people live in cages through which we are invited to inspect them.
I'll make my point more explicit. Let's take women, for example, and let's take the provincial girl Ruby Ruggles. She doesn't want to marry embarrassingly devoted local farmer John Crumb, and as a teenage girl myself I can hardly blame her. She prefers the beautiful and way above her station Sir Felix, but everyone and their mother knows that the chances of that scoundrel marrying her are fewer than me writing a review without sarcasm. John Crumb is the best thing for her — so agrees the odious American lady Mrs Hurtle, the narrator, and even - reluctantly - me. Ruby should do the sensible thing, put all absurd fantasies of Sir Felix out of her head and content herself with John Crumb, who really is not so bad.
I'm not making a great feminist criticism of Trollope: I am sure he did think women were for more than just marriage. I am pointing out how shit life is for women in this era, and using the example of Ruby (+ my rage at her fate) to illustrate what I mean by Trollope's style. Our response makes up half the story; it is the emotions we experience as readers which complete Trollope's meaning. Sure, Ruby might be reconciled to her fate and even find herself happy, but I am not. The gap between reader and novel is huge because Trollope's narrator, unlike George Eliot's, hardly talks to the reader. My dissatisfaction at Ruby's fate is in some ways a part of the narrative: because although the narrator never explicitly tells the reader that Ruby has a kind of shit time of it, the irony with which the novel presents her fate
Another example, higher up the social scale, is that silly, untalented Lady Carbury is eventually persuaded into giving up her literary ambitions.
Generally the men have a better time of it, but there's Lord Nidderdale's tragedy of the stiff upper lip, Roger Carbury's tragedy of being old, fusty and saddled with a cheerleader detrimental to his cause, and Sir Felix's general misfortune of being himself. And I shall let other reviews dwell on Augustus Melmotte, because although he is in many ways the heart of this novel I find him unbearably dull.
There's a kind of comfort to reading a Victorian novel. Not that they are predictable, exactly, but altogether things end up as they should — or if they don't, it is for reasons of poignancy. Paul Montague earned his romantic happiness when he showed some character in the matter of the Mexican Railway earlier in the novel. It was easy to tell that John Crumb would probably be alright — his surname is so bad it repels all other misfortune, else Trollope would be risking a melodrama. Some might call this melodramatic: it takes a hundred chapters for the young lovers unite, the middle-aged (but still beautiful) lady to find domestic bliss, the selfish young man to be shuffled off to Germany with a clergyman's family and the damned scoundrel to be entirely ruined. But with what excellent plot and pacing is this executed! And what an even spread of irony there is to make this rather conventional story a sharp and brilliant satire of society and manners.