The sole reason for the four-star rating is the very slow and clumsy start of the book it seems that Trollope knew exactly what he was doing (when does he not?), but that in dealing with this many characters and more subplots than any previous Barsetshire novel, he couldn’t settle on where the focus was. Love, romance, deceit, gossip, back-stabbings, and several twists and turns that show Trollope is at his finest, wanting quite obviously-but successfully-to end the series with a flourish and a great deal of lament and remembrance. Harding… it’s much fanfare for the swan song, and it’s as thrilling to read this closure to a world that only Trollope could make seem so real as it is to leave it behind, tucked coolly on the bookshelf to delve into in perhaps another decade or so. Proudie, whose shenanigans make Barchester Towers the comical tour de force that it is, even though it’s a bit of an outsider when taken with the rest of the Barsetshire books.
Many of the characters that populate The Last Chronicle appear in the previous four books, but especially from Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington -and, of course, the fire-cracking Mrs. Some of this is awkward and clumsy, with quite a bit of redundant scenes toward the beginning of the novel, especially as he attempts to gain the reader’s sympathy for poor Josiah Crawley, a perpetual curate (and an unlikely protagonist for this, but, as it turns out, the perfect one) who is accused of stealing a check for £20. It feels, in many ways, like the end of an era the close of a century.Īs is usual with Trollope, he takes his time to set the stage but since most of his novels in the Barsetshire series are not as long as this, the last, one, here he takes triple the amount of time: where he normally needs about a hundred-or-so pages to set the preliminary characters into motion, in The Last Chronicle it takes him nearly three-hundred pages to do so.
"When I see women kiss, I always think that there is a deep hatred at the bottom of it.”And so the long, arduous, fitful, endearing, maddening, and epic-filled Chronicles of Barsetshire are at an end… and it’s a glorious end that my four-star rating can’t truly reflect, unless you’ve read them all in order and in fairly quick succession. ”I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other.
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