Word: trollopian
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...photo which accompanied the feature looked promising. Michael looked vaguely Byronic, Rebecca looked poetically consumptive. Since they were both English concentrators, I expected articulate, coherent, even "Trollopian" sentences. I looked forward to casual allusions to Chaucer, a deconstructed double entendre here, a joke in Arthurian English there. I was disappointed...
Sweat and Gibber. Raven, 49, is also a writer of mysteries and high-class potboilers (Friends in Low Places) that dwell on sex and intrigue among the upper classes. But he has been a dedicated Trollopian since his undergraduate days at Cambridge. Nevertheless, he spent six months "sweating and gibbering" before he found the right blueprint for the series, which he suggested. He would throw out Trollope's character A as boring and superfluous -only to watch her turn up 700 pages later as someone essential to the denouement. Character B would be discarded, then put quickly back when...
...Will Ladislaw?) Mr. Wilson's own vision is unfailingly clear, his thought unswervingly honest, two facts which make him the most important writer in Britain today. Yet--obscured by his proclaimed Olympian associations--his first three novels have brought him the lukewarm and standardized praise dished out to Trollopian retreads like the late Mrs. Angela Thirkell...
...plot hinges on whether Miles will be appointed head of a new laboratory set up to study his own specialty. It is a Trollopian situation, as scientific panjandrums play politics with the skill and gusto of the Barchester Cathedral chapter contending over a vacant canonry. But the real story is a crisis in faith. Miles is distracted from his devotions by a girl named Audrey, and it is easy to see why Lord Rutherford did not like the erotic bits. She and Miles live it up at meetings of the Holborn Labour Party, and their sex life is described...
Trollope's dovetailing of all this material into a single major plot of slowly mounting drama is an awesome feat. More typically Trollopian are his incidental, illuminating comments on the normal and everyday: on a country squire ("He endeavored to enable his tenants and laborers to live"); of British hotel coffee ("An unlimited supply of lukewarm water poured over an infinitesimal proportion of chicory"). Trollope's unaccustomed passion for plot is no substitute for more such salty asides, dry touches of humor, and lore of human kind...
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