Harry Reid explains his choice of a Victorian novel and a brief
example of early Scottish fiction
TWO great novels for a sceptical teenager? The Way We Live Now,
Trollope's masterpiece, is a huge Victorian novel. Its length might
render it formidable for a reluctant reader, unused to the rhythms of
prose fiction. But this novel is so entertaining that I doubt if anyone,
even the most thrawn of adolescents, would give up once having read the
first 50 pages.
The Way We Live Now is filled with memorable characters -- and
dominating them all is the French swindler, Melmotte, who takes London
by storm. Trollope's portrait of the toadies and grovellers who grease
up to this Robert Maxwell-style crook, lured by money and power, while
furtively despising him, is superb.
The novel does lose something of its charge and tension after
Melmotte's suicide. But other great characters abound -- some of them
decent, like Melmotte's spirited daughter Marie, and the Jewish
businessman Breghert, but most of them despicable, like the drunken
waster Sir Felix Cadbury and his shallow, silly mother Lady Cadbury (two
of the most devastating portraits of English unpleasantness in fiction).
The novel also has far more than its fair share of wonderful
set-pieces; my favourite is Melmotte's drunken debacle at the House of
Commons.
It has to be admitted that Trollope's prose style is somewhat
pedestrian -- not surprising since he wrote 3000 words before breakfast
every morning -- but he is always readable. And this novel shows how
effectively a novelist can analyse the rottenness in a society.
Trollope's specific targets -- and he does not miss -- are the City and
the English aristocracy. But he also takes sideswipes at many other
institutions including the London Press and the Catholic Church. It is
the detail, the force and the integrity of his condemnation that give
this novel its vigour.
John Gibson Lockhart's Adam Blair could hardly be more different. For
a start, it is much shorter; it is hardly a full-length novel, rather a
novella. Lockhart was Walter Scott's son-in-law and although he was a
lesser writer than the master, at least he had the merit of brevity.
Adam Blair was written in 1821 but it describes the Scotland of about
60 years earlier. The book starts with a cloying piety which disappears
as Lockhart gets into his stride. Its theme is adultery; Lockhart writes
from a moral, religious and social perspective which is light years away
from the values that are current today. Yet he shows how it is possible
to write powerfully about sexual passion while totally eschewing
detailed physical description. There is no prurience in his story;
rather there is a sensitive power, even a profundity.
The simple story lingers in the mind. It is subtly told -- despite the
odd gothic excess -- and the careful reader would realise that its
indictment of Scotland is in its oblique way every bit as potent as
Trollope's full-frontal assault on England.
The novel is also notable for the delicate and utterly honest portrait
of Mrs Charlotte Campbell -- one of the few occasions a Scottish male
writer manages to write really well about a female character. The
protagonist, Adam Blair himself, is weakly drawn, but there is a
splendid villain in the malevolent Edinburgh lawyer Strahan. There is
also a demotic integrity in Lockhart's sparing but mature use of Scots.
I can think of no better introduction to early Scottish fiction.
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