Literary matters

Part of the fall out from the massive dose of Trollope reported on 12th November, was a boxed set of Pallisers, about 25 hours of ancient costume drama from BBC for about £25. A little dated but the set has served us well during the continuing dearth of proper evening fodder on ITV3. A significant drawback is that I do not care much for Susan Hampshire in the rather large role of Lady Glen. Another example of the difficulty of portraying someone who is a bit of a pain without making the portrait one too.

But, as noted in November, I like the way that Trollope manages to work some serious points into his light entertainment. So, for example, after the trial of P. Finn for murder collapses, he is rather shocked to think that his once so solid and substantial life had hung on the slender thread of a bit of evidence which had been turned up more or less by luck and very much at the last minute. A bit of evidence which was, as an object, entirely insignificant; nothing grand about it at all. Not an imposing cavalry saber or anything like that. His once so solid and substantial life suddenly seems a lot less solid and substantial; drifting on the edge of the abyss even, and it takes a while for him to recover his poise.

And then he starts to moan about how even his close friends had started to doubt his innocence in the face of the circumstantial evidence (there was none of the other sort). But the duke explains to him that one can never be absolutely sure of how one would behave oneself under extreme provocation, never mind be absolutely sure about the behavior of someone else. One might be innocent of the charge, but one just has to accept that there may well be doubt among one's friends - who, hopefully, will remain one's friends notwithstanding. At which point Finn starts to pull himself together.

I have not checked but I doubt whether these serious points have been invented by the BBC adaptor. But they were got across.

The other literary matter is a review of a book about narrative art and historical truth in 'War and Peace' from Cornell University, the review being by no less a person than the professor of Russian and Georgian (rather an odd pairing?) at Queen Mary College. He alleges that Tolstoy modeled 'War and Peace', at least the bits which are not about war, on Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair'. So the foul Hélène Kuragin does service for Becky Sharpe, Prince Andrei does service for the foul Captain Osborne and Natasha does service for drippy Amelia. What a load of old twaddle. How long is it since the reviewer read either book? They are both good books, long books, books with lots of characters. But one is warm and loving while the other is comic and comparatively superficial. Is the reviewer really a scholar of Georgian who had to tack Russian onto his handle for some obscure reason of universital bureaucracy?