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Can You Forgive Her? review
Mar. 18th, 2010 02:03 pmCan You Forgive Her? is the oddly titled first book in the Palliser series, by Anthony Trollope.
It's a satisfyingly chunky book, with a lot to recommend it. Not as much fun as Barchester Towers, the characters are more realistic and the plotlines therefore slightly less predictable. It takes a while to get going, and gets sillier towards the end, but is in no way tedious. I was more interested in the sub-plots than the main plot, as the heroine did not really engage my sympathy (I didn't find her actions offensive enough to require forgiveness on my part, though I suppose I could relate in part to her giving things up unecessarily because she thought she didn't deserve them).
The only thing that even remotely annoyed me about the book was the way in which the author jumped around in time. He kept opening chapters wtih the words "Now we must go back a little to describe such-and-such a thing so you can understand what happended next." It was a bit distracting and in some places difficult to figure out what happened in which order. But that was a minor quibble, and I suppose inevitable in a book with some many characters, and storylines criss-crossing in multiple locations.
I will definitely be investigating more of the series, as I believe Trollope capable of maintaining interest in these kinds of stories almost infinitely.
It's a satisfyingly chunky book, with a lot to recommend it. Not as much fun as Barchester Towers, the characters are more realistic and the plotlines therefore slightly less predictable. It takes a while to get going, and gets sillier towards the end, but is in no way tedious. I was more interested in the sub-plots than the main plot, as the heroine did not really engage my sympathy (I didn't find her actions offensive enough to require forgiveness on my part, though I suppose I could relate in part to her giving things up unecessarily because she thought she didn't deserve them).
The only thing that even remotely annoyed me about the book was the way in which the author jumped around in time. He kept opening chapters wtih the words "Now we must go back a little to describe such-and-such a thing so you can understand what happended next." It was a bit distracting and in some places difficult to figure out what happened in which order. But that was a minor quibble, and I suppose inevitable in a book with some many characters, and storylines criss-crossing in multiple locations.
I will definitely be investigating more of the series, as I believe Trollope capable of maintaining interest in these kinds of stories almost infinitely.
