Book review: Das Varden

Another Trollope; the first in the Barsetshire series. Read all about it at wiki. Very much in line with what I might have expected from Framley Parsonage.

This one has a church theme, specifically the presumably topical problem of how the archaic system of various parishes coming with "livings" of semi-arbitrary amounts, and being given to favoured men by the gift of whoever; although in this case the living is the wardenship of an almshouse, funded by the proceeds of a will from long ago.

All the main characters are implausibly noble and good, and even the ones who are less so - there have to be some, or the plot would collapse into niceness - are treated with kindness by the author. This is kinda acceptable: the meta-theme of the book is how even good people can fail to come to a sensible solution of a problem.

The story trundles along, to an acceptable conclusion: our noble warden ends up in a smaller house, but still one perfectly adequate to his needs; his daughter still gets a good marriage; the uppity pensioners are punished by drinking themselves to death and similar bad ends, as the almshouses themselves fall into decay. That last feels rather cruel of our author; all the nice respectable middle class folk are handled kindly and live happily ever after but the uppity poor are not spared. Probably, this is a useful lesson about those times, and perhaps our own. These sad deaths are really to be laid at the door of the bishop, for failing to appoint a new warden; he does so in a pointy and vindictive dig at the campaigners, but we don't get to dwell on that.

The warden feels compelled to resign because of two pressures: he cannot bear to read nasty things about himself in the Times; and he cannot of his own conscience condone his receiving the living. The first is weak of him. The second is better, but I'm pretty sure the book takes care that he never reads the will for himself, so his basis of thinking so is also weak.

The story though is nicely written and interesting, and the book more pleasant to read than, say, the Michael Moorcock I'm currently on, which by comparison is rather hastily-written, fluffy but somehow indigestible.

On the overall theme of the book: would one feel that the Church of England was in good hands, based on the desription in the book? I think not.