Hooked

I'm at the halfway stage of The Prime Minister and utterly hooked, not an unusual situation to encounter when reading Trollope, in my experience. I love the pace of the story-telling. Unhurried, allowing time for the narrative to breathe. The development of Lopez into an entirely plausible villain has been done with great delicacy, a quality that seems to be rarely associated with our novelist, so often regarded - entirely falsely - as the meat and potatoes man of the Victorian novel.

I see him as much more akin to Jane Austen than any of his contemporaries. Even though the key female character Emily Wharton is a bit of a wet blanket compered to Trollope's more vivacious heroines, she still commands a subtle sympathy in terms of the horrendous marriage she is trapped in. And her being trapped is wholly believable. I'd challenge any reader to read the opening hundred pages and figure she's in the process of making a terrible decision, yet there's no cheating at all. Lopez is what he is from the beginning. And the wonderful Glencora - who more than compensates for Emily's lack of oomph - makes a similar kind of mistake.

The wonderful thing is that at this point I really have little or no idea as to where the story is going to go. And I'm very happy to have Trollope take me there.