But speculative fiction merely involves a different approach to engaging with and critiquing contemporary issues from the approach that realist fiction demands.
It’s true: Trollope’s novel seems like a departure from his other fiction. It’s been called a sort of answer to Trollope’s first great novel, The Warden, published more than a quarter of a century earlier. It even brings some of his other, more famous work more sharply into focus. In many ways the work is quintessentially Trollopian, dealing with the rules and regulations of institutions and focusing on the individual who is caught up within it all. But perhaps this is the wrong way of looking at it. Set in 1980 in the fictional republic of Britannula, the novel is everything a Trollope novel shouldn’t be: futuristic, speculative, with a central ‘concept’ rather than a series of finely observed social observations. The Fixed Period (1882), Trollope’s last novel, is an oddity among Trollope’s other works of social realism documenting contemporary life. In response to the title of one of Trollope’s novels, Can You Forgive Her?, James is said to have quipped: ‘Yes, and forget her, too.’ Yet his novels of provincial life, British politics, and ecclesiastical scheming remain in print, with his Chronicles of Barsetshire and his Palliser novels still firm favourites with many readers. (Clearly such industriousness ran in the family: Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope, woke at 4 o’clock every morning and got her day’s writing finished in time to serve breakfast.) Not everyone was a fan of his work, which was considered too workmanlike for such an artful writer as Henry James. And he did much of this while holding down a job at the Post Office, by getting up at 5.30 every morning and writing 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch.
He wrote 47 novels, as well as numerous works of non-fiction including autobiography and travel writing.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a most unTrollopian Trollope novelĪnthony Trollope was a prolific writer.
0 kommentar(er)
