I'm absolutely loving the second half of Trollope's The Prime Minister. It's just so unpredictable. Now at the final 150 pages or so, I honestly haven't a clue where the narrative is going. The suicide of Lopez didn't exactly take me by surprise, but that's only because Trollope makes it seem inevitable in the four or five chapters preceding it, and doesn't cheat at all in terms of the overall trajectory of the character. The only thing that jars is the depiction of Emily - she's so perfectly passive - but even that can be linked psychologically with the kind of passive-aggressive behaviour you might expect from a Victorian lady trapped in an appalling marriage - and, boy, doesn't our author make you feel how absolute that trap must have been for 'nice' girls like her.
Where Trollope seems to me stronger than any of his contemporaries is in his precision regarding the reality of money and its power over us. Part of the savage power of the narrative charting Lopez's decline and fall is that you get to know exactly how much money he needs and exactly when he needs it in order to stay afloat. You feel yourself drowning along with him in the desperate whirlpool of need his speculations create. There's something uncannily modern and unsettling about all this.
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