Trollope’s Phineas Finn: Climbing the Ladder of Ambition

Phineas Finn is the second Anthony Trollope novel I’ve read (you can read my review of Can You Forgive Her? here), and the second in his Palliser series. In this novel, our hero, Phineas Finn, is a good natured, very attractive, and upstanding young man who is the son of an Irish country doctor. His father has paid his expenses while he studies under Mr. Low, a London barrister (lawyer). While dining at his club, young Finn is approached by his friend, Barrington Erle, and convinced to run for a seat in parliament for the borough of Loughshane. It’s a dead certainty he will win it, since there will be no serious opposition. The only problem is that members of parliament (MPs) do not get paid, and Phineas is entirely dependent on his father for his expenses!

Despite his father’s and Mr. Low’s very good arguments against running, Phineas decides to do it, and before he knows it, he is seated in Parliament. His longsuffering father agrees to continue his allowance until he can somehow figure out a way to pay his own way. Soon, he is swimming in the high society of London, but he manages to keep his head and remain humble. He becomes friends with another Irish MP, Laurence Fitzgibbon, a glib and somewhat dissolute young man who wastes no time convincing Finn to guarantee a bill for 250 pounds, assuring him that he will have the money in a couple of weeks, and there is nothing to worry about.

He also is befriended by Lady Laura Standish, who takes Phineas under her wing, because she sees such promise in him. She is another character of Trollope’s who illustrates the frustrating position upper class women in Victorian England were in: she is smart and well educated, and she has good ideas about what legislation should be passed by Parliament, but there is no way she can bring them to fruition, given she has no vote, let alone no way to run for parliament. Phineas is convinced he’s in love with Lady Laura and proposes to her, but she turns him down, because he is penniless, and she has given all of her money to her brother, Lord Chiltern, so he can settle some enormous debts he’s acquired through questionable life choices.

Lord Chiltern is a bit of a wild man – he despises social conventions and proper manners, preferring to spend his time hunting and traveling around England and Europe. He is in love with the beautiful Violet Effingham, who stands to inherit a large fortune when she marries. He has proposed to her three times (not very tactfully, it must be said), and she has flatly refused him because of his poor reputation and erratic behavior. To make things worse, Chiltern’s father has had nothing to do with him since his sister squandered her share of the family fortune to settle his obligations.

Lady Laura convinces Phineas to befriend Chiltern, in the hopes that he will be a moderating influence on him. They become friends, until Phineas meets Violet and decides he wants to marry her! The good friends become deadly rivals.

As a backdrop to all of this drama, Trollope chronicles all of the political intrigue involved in the passage of the Reform Bill of 1866. The reader is shown in exhausting detail how parliament works, and, by and large, it’s not pretty. What is interesting is how Finn, as a tyro MP, gradually gains confidence. At first, he is too terrified to even stand up and make a speech. Eventually, he finds his legs, and he becomes a trusted member of the Liberal party, led by the Prime Minister William Mildmay. Finn’s greatest asset is his ability to keep his mouth shut when necessary and to make pleasant conversation with the right people. Very soon, he is elevated to a paying position in the cabinet. Regardless of his rapid rise in society, he remains a very likeable character, due to his total lack of vanity.

As the novel progresses, Trollope uses various characters to illustrate different issues that were present in Victorian England. Phineas is an ambitious, yet talented and altruistic, young man from whose presence parliament would benefit, yet it is nearly impossible from him to affect legislation, even when he is made a government minister. The crisis of the novel occurs when he has to decide whether he will support a bill that will help his fellow Irish but goes against the policy of the governing party, of which he is a member. If he votes according to his conscience, he will be required to submit his resignation and lose his salary.

Lady Laura is the most tragic figure. Moments before Phineas proposes to her, she accepts Robert Kennedy’s offer of marriage. He is another MP, and one of the richest men in the UK. She feels that through him, she might be able to influence English politics. Unfortunately, Mr. Kennedy is an insufferable prig who insists Laura submit herself to the proper duties of a wife and have no independence at all. Their marriage degenerates to the point where they can barely communicate.

“Laura”, he said, “I am sorry that I contradicted you.”

“I am quite used to it, Robert.”

“No; – you are not used to it.” She smiled and lowered her head.
(ii, p. 109, Oxford Univ. Press Ed., 1991)

There is also a Madame Marie Goesler, a wealthy German widow, who moves in the highest circles of London society, but feels trapped by the fact that she can do nothing but attend parties and host them herself.

Phineas becomes very good friends with Joshua Monk, a “radical” MP who helps Phineas get his confidence during his first term in parliament. Mr. Monk, though, when he is offered and accepts a post in the government by the Liberals, loses his effectiveness as a debater, because he is forced to support the Liberals’ policies, even when he disagrees with them.

Trollope paints a fascinating and detailed picture of how politics worked in Victorian England. There was much frustration at the demands placed upon MPS to toe the party line, yet enforcing party discipline was the only way to get important legislation passed. Like today, opposing parties had to compromise, and everyone gave up something to get something in return. Near the end of the book, Monk’s and Finn’s bill to help Irish tenants fails on the second reading. Finn is dejected, but Monk makes this observation:

“Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable; – and so at last it will be ranged on the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.”
(ii, p. 341)

Like almost all Victorian novels, Phineas Finn is long – 712 pages in the edition I read. However, it is an interesting complement to Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, another tale of a self-made young man. While Dickens was the master of chronicling the travails and triumphs of England’s lower and middle classes, Trollope gives us accurate portraits of what it was like to move in the highest social strata of Victorian society. He isn’t afraid to point out the contradictions and injustices of the governing class, yet all of his characters are real. Phineas Finn is amazingly successful at first, but he has his flaws. His fellow MPs all exhibit human foibles – they each have good qualities as well as lesser ones. However, it’s the female characters that are the most fleshed out by Trollope – he has sincere sympathy for the plight they are in. They have very limited choices: either marry or be an “old maid”, but in neither case can a woman be an active political force. And once a young woman marries, she has no rights to any property or personal agency. If a young woman is due to inherit wealth, there is no guarantee she will be allowed to use it to live independently. However, lest one think Phineas Finn is all angst and frustration, Trollope sprinkles a lot of humor to leaven the drama. At heart, he loves his country and its people.

There are lots of free digital versions of Phineas Finn (you can download a nicely formatted one here.), but I really appreciated my Oxford University Press edition, because it had lots of helpful notes that explained the political events that were occurring at the time the novel is set in, as well as the meanings of slang phrases, references to other literary works, etc. I’ve read two of the six Palliser novels, so I guess I’d better get ready to tackle Phineas Redux next!

Raymond Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake – Classic Noir

The Lady In The Lake (1943) is the fourth novel by Raymond Chandler. He wrote quite a few short stories for pulp magazines before hitting it big with his first novel, The Big Sleep. That one introduced his hero, private detective Philip Marlowe, memorably played by Humphrey Bogart on the silver screen.

The Lady In The Lake is a far cry from the genteel and relatively sedate mysteries of Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. The first word that comes to my mind is gritty. Marlowe is a tough man doing a tough job in a tough town, Los Angeles, CA. He is dogged in his pursuit of truth, and he tries to do the right thing, even when it could cost him his life. Surrounded by corrupt cops, unscrupulous businessmen, and scheming women, Marlowe never wavers from his desire to get to the bottom of the case, regardless of where it takes him.

This case begins with a high-powered executive, Derace Kingsley, hiring Marlowe to find his missing wife. She disappeared a month ago, and he received a telegram from her informing him that she was getting a Mexican divorce and marrying a Chris Lavery – a notorious young womanizer. Before too long in his investigation, Marlowe has discovered a woman who was drowned weeks ago in a lake, and who is married to doctor who provides drugs to a select clientele. This doctor lives across the street from Lavery.

Kingsley is having an affair with his office assistant, Adrienne Fromsett, whose handkerchief Marlowe finds at Lavery’s house. It’s very complicated, and the police are constantly giving Marlowe a hard time while he tries to unravel the web of deceit and corruption.

I really like Chandler’s style, especially when he describes a setting. He is the master of the unexpected yet apt metaphor and simile. Here are some examples:

On the wall there was a huge tinted photograph of an elderly party with a chiselled beak and whiskers and a wing collar. The Adam’s apple that edged through his wing collar looked harder than most people’s chins.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 184-186). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The clerk on duty was an eggheaded man with no interest in me or in anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 1287-1288). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2155-2157). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a bacardi cocktail.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2723-2724). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2900-2903). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it.
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 2915-2916). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

You get the idea! There’s also a dry sense of humor that Marlowe employs to leaven the general grimness.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier. “One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”
“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”
Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER. The Lady in the Lake (Kindle Locations 3143-3147). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Plot-wise, The Lady In The Lake holds up very well. Chandler does an excellent job making sure the reader can keep all the various threads of the mystery clear, despite it being complicated. And I was genuinely surprised by a major plot twist near the end. The Lady In The Lake is an example of American noir fiction at its very finest. Even though it is set in 1940s LA, it could just as easily happen today.

Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden: Mystery, Allegory, and the Purpose of Art

I was given Allen Levi’s novel, Theo of Golden for my birthday last month. When I first looked at it, I noticed that it was not published by any “name” publishing house. There was no plot teaser on the dustjacket flap, nor any author biography. As a matter of fact, it seems that this is a self-published novel. And yet, it is one of the most moving and rewarding books I’ve ever read. It is being sold and enjoyed by readers through word of mouth, which I find very encouraging.

Theo of Golden opens with an old, yet active and fit, man who shows up in the small southern city of Golden, which is somewhere in Georgia. This man, the Theo of the title, spends his first morning on Golden taking his time enjoying the picturesque main street of the town – the beautiful tree-lined median, the fountains, the nineteenth century storefronts, and the river nearby.

Theo is from Portugal, and he has a place in New York City from which he has recently arrived. He doesn’t seem to have any problems with money, and he is very kind. When he enters a coffee shop, The Chalice, he notices dozens of beautiful and striking pencil portraits of local persons. They are for sale, and the name of each subject is on the back of the portraits. He decides to buy them and give them to the subjects. He carefully chooses his first portrait, which is of a young woman whose “unsmiling but not unfriendly face” interests him. He finds out what her address is and writes her a polite letter, offering her her portrait if she will meet him near a fountain on the main street.

The woman, Minette Prentiss, accepts his invitation, but not without some apprehension from her and her husband. When she and Theo meet, they have a very nice conversation, and before she knows it, she has shared details of her life that have been troubling her for years. It also turns out that Minette is the niece of the artist who drew all of the portraits, Asher Glissen.

And so begins a very mysterious tale. Levi drops hints from the beginning that Theo has some sort of connection to Golden, and a plan behind his generosity. He soon finds an apartment above the office of James Ponder, who is one of the town’s most respected citizens. He is a “consultant” who advises people. He is the soul of discretion, and when he vouches for Theo, people’s natural suspicions are allayed. He also mentions to his secretary that Theo’s father was a client of his many years ago.

When Theo has an opportunity to give a portrait to the custodian of the local university, he discovers that the man, Kendrick Whitaker, has a young daughter who was injured in a car accident and is not receiving very good care in the hospital. Theo arranges it so that he can anonymously pay for the best orthopedic surgeon to work on her leg.

When Theo meets with Asher Glissen, they have a very interesting conversation about what makes art “good”:

Asher looked at the old man. “Theo, I get the impression you’ve thought about this before. What do you think makes for good art?”

Theo rested his chin on his right thumb and placed a bent index finger over his bottom lip.

“Yes, I have thought about it. In fact, I’ve thought about it a great deal. And I’ve asked others about it. But I don’t know if I have an answer either. Other than this. It might not make a lot of sense, but for anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it. I’m not even sure I know fully what that means, but the older I get, the more I believe it. There must be love for the gift itself, love for the subject being depicted or the story being told, and love for the audience. Whether the art is sculpture, farming, teaching, lawmaking, medicine, music, or raising a child, if love is not in it – at the very heart of it – it might be skillful, marketable, or popular, but I doubt it is truly good. Nothing is what it’s supposed to be if love is not at the core.”
(pages 128-129)

As the story progresses, Theo makes more “bestowals” of portraits to unsuspecting residents of Golden, and his friendships with some of them deepen. Tony, a Vietnam veteran who runs the local bookstore becomes a particularly close friend. Ellen, an emotionally troubled homeless woman, is another. Person by person, Theo collects and nurtures a group of people, each of whom he insists is capable of “saintliness”, whether they believe it or not.

The novel is composed of 62 brief chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter is a self-contained vignette with little connection to the others, until, very gradually, some threads are picked up and woven into a larger narrative. Levi drops subtle nods to Scripture throughout – never in a preachy way – that are as natural to the flow of the story as the Oxbow river that flows through Golden.

Levi also has a way of painting with words. On practically every page is a beautiful description of a scene that is described in a “painterly” way:

The radiance of the evening sun through stained glass dappled the sanctuary. The slow movement of color would have been undetectable from minute to minute, but over the course of the hour, patches of red, lavender, melon, gold, and emerald shifted kaleidoscopically across the room. The sun was a brush; the west window its palette; the floor, walls, ceiling, and congregants its canvas; an angel somewhere, the artist. (page 365)

Golden is an Eden in which Theo is able to gently work his generosity, but like the Biblical Eden, there are unsettling elements. Asher’s brother, Pearce, who is also Minette’s father, is a businessman who is consumed with accumulating money and property. He is unable to put down his phone and simply enjoy the moment. To reveal any more is to spoil the story, but suffice it to say that love does triumph, in a very surprising way.

Theo of Golden is one of the most tender and satisfying stories I’ve ever read, and I don’t usually go for that kind of tale. However, Levi avoids any saccharine sentimentality, with his spare prose and his masterful depictions of a small southern town as it lives through the seasons of one year. This is one book that deserves all of the praise it is getting, and I hope Levi graces us with another one soon.

Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? – The First Pallisers Novel

Ever since I read Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, I have been a fan of Victorian literature. Anthony Trollope was a contemporary of Dickens, and an incredibly prolific writer. Can You Forgive Her? is the first novel in his Palliser series. It begins with the dilemma facing Alice Vavasor: “What should a woman do with her life?” For an upper-class woman in Victorian England, the options were limited to marrying or living with relatives the rest of your life.

Alice is engaged to a man everyone (including her) acknowledges is a perfect catch. John Grey has a substantial estate in Cambridgeshire, he is definitely in love with her, he is intelligent, handsome, and doting. Yet, Alice looks upon a future with him with apprehension – she only sees herself trapped in a boring country estate with no intellectual or social stimulation. As she explains to her aunt McLeod,

People always do seem to think it so terrible that a girl should have her own way in anything. She mustn’t like any one at first; and then, when she does like some one, she must marry him directly she’s bidden. I haven’t much of my own way at present; but you see, when I’m married I shan’t have it at all.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE. Can You Forgive Her? (Kindle Locations 564-566). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

It doesn’t help that she previously was in love with her cousin, George Vavasor, who cheated on her. He fancies himself a bohemian who is above such mundane institutions as marriage, and he and his sister, Kate, waste no time convincing Alice to break off her engagement with Grey.

Alice convinces herself she is unworthy of being John Grey’s wife, but to her consternation, he refuses to accept her rejection of him and insists she is still betrothed to him. He isn’t ugly or forceful in any way, he is simply confident that, given time, she will come to her senses and return to him.

Kate Vavasor is also unmarried, and she has an extended visit with her aunt, Arabella Greenow. Mrs. Greenow has recently lost her fabulously wealthy older husband, and Trollope’s account of how she flirts with two men – the boring but well-off farmer Mr. Cheesacre and the dashing but penniless Mr. Bellfield – while observing the proper mourning rituals is hilarious.

Yet another cousin of Alice, Lady Glencora Palliser, invites Alice up to her estate to spend a few weeks. Lady Glencora is very rich, very young, and recently married to Plantagenet Palliser, a very dull man who greatest ambition is to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. She once loved a dissolute young man, Burgo Fitzgerald, but her family intervened and made her marry the much more suitable Palliser. He doesn’t give her much attention, and she is fairly miserable.

Burgo is friends with George Vavasor, and he hopes to elope with Glencora to Italy. George doesn’t encourage him to do this, but he doesn’t discourage him, either. George is basically amoral, and he pursues whatever path will give him the most pleasure. He breaks up Alice and John Grey’s engagement, because he gets a kick out of it, not because he is in love with Alice. So the stage is set for all kinds of social intrigue and shenanigans; in other words, a perfect setting for a Victorian novel!

This is the first novel by Trollope I’ve read, and I’m impressed. He is very different from Dickens, though. Where it was always clear from his works that Dickens had a heart for the poor and downtrodden in Victorian England, Trollope obviously moved in a higher social setting. He chronicles the issues and conflicts facing the British governing class in the mid-nineteenth century.

Can You Forgive Her? is primarily concerned with the limited options available to upper class women of that time. Alice is principled (to a fault) and wants to make a difference in English society. Her only option, since she can’t vote – let alone run for Parliament – is to ally herself to someone who can run for office. That is a major reason why she breaks off her engagement to John Grey; he is quite happy to live a quiet and prosperous life in Cambridgeshire, taking no interest at all in politics.

Lady Glencora is forced into a marriage with the up and coming Plantagenet Palliser, and even though it is her fortune that makes possible his political career, she has no interest. She is the most interesting character in the novel. She yearns to be free of stuffy Victorian conventions, and she delights in tweaking her poor husband’s sensibilities. She’s never in danger of getting into any scandal, but she is very funny whenever she decides to do what she wants.

More serious is George Vavasor. Initially, he is a somewhat sympathetic character, in that he wants his former love, Alice, to renew their relationship. He is very clever in the ways he manipulates her and his sister, Kate, to get what he wants. As the novel progresses, he becomes more and more trapped in a downward spiral of greed, deceit, and fury. By the end of the book, he is truly evil.

Plantagenet undergoes character growth in a positive way, learning how to be a good husband to Lady Glencora restoring proper perspective to his life. He and Cora will return in later Palliser novels, and I look forward to seeing their marriage mature.

Aunt Greenow also develops into a worthy character. At first, she is comical in her flirtations with Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield, but when her niece Kate needs her, she is there with excellent advice and moral support.

The main negative of the novel is the indecision of Alice when it comes to accepting John Grey’s standing offer to resume their engagement. She drags her feet for increasingly poor reasons, and it gets tiresome to read of her inner struggles when there really isn’t much reason for them. However, as a portrait of upper class Victorian England, Can You Forgive Her? is a detailed and fascinating glimpse into a long gone era. I will definitely read the next novel in the series, Phineas Finn.