BOOK REPORT: THE WARDEN by Anthony Trollope
It’s been at least five years since I last read a Trollope and I enjoy them always, but can’t remember a single thing about any of them - other than the odd supporting character here or there. Unlike Dickens where everything is so broad it all is grafted onto your consciousness, Trollope is about situations that are so slippery and conflicted, that just like life, once it passes, you can’t remember what all the fuss is about.
Given that, what I think all of Trollope is basically about, what The Warden is about anyway, is how life would be a lot better if people would just try to make the best out of what they are handed and be good to people around them then to get a lot of ideas in their heads. In Trollope, when someone gets an idea in their head - and they usually do for the most noble reasons - it means everyone around them is soon going to suffer and no one is going to come out for the better.
Which is more or less how I see life, so Trollope and I stand together. As I get older, I see most of the problems in the world are caused by people getting ideas in their heads: She wants a big wedding; he’s got this vision there should only be one person at their wedding. Neither can let go of the idea in their head, so they don’t have a wedding at all and break up and their children are never born on down into infinity. At work, someone has a notion things have to be this way, despite the fact that that way is clearly not working and the way they are doing it is making life miserable for everyone around them and their boss has told them they need to change it. But they get themselves fired because they just can’t let go of this is the way it has to be.
On a societal scale, of course, the last hundred years has seen people with utopian schemes (of both the left and right varieties) cause more death and misery than all the previous conquests and religious crusades in history combined.
The plot of The Warden is too complicated to rehash - although the book is short - but basically an old reverend is living comfortable as the custodian of a charitable trust set up hundreds of years before. It wasn’t originally intended that the custodian should live quite so well, but intentions are hard to get at over hundreds of years, and that’s how its evolved, he is doing good work for it, everyone is fairly happy, until this young reformer comes to town and even though he’s in love with the warden’s daughter, he some how gets it in his craw that its his duty to stick his nose in and make this right; but right, as Trollope best of all sees, is rarely an all or nothing, clean sweep proposition, but a 55/45 thing, requiring lots of compromises and humility.
Anyway, not the splashiest Trollope I’ve read. (Folks wanted to dive in would do well to being with Phineas Finn), but a good romp through moral ambiguity.
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