Framley Parsonage review

There's really not much to say about Framley Parsonage.  It's Anthony Trollope, so it's brilliantly written, but contains further proof that he had only a limited number of character types and plot points, which were then mixed up into different combinations in his books.  As Phineas Finn appeared to be modelled on Frank Gresham, so Mark Robarts seems to be modelled on Phineas Finn - hanging around with the wrong crowd in the hopes of advancement, signing his name to bills he can't pay at the behest of so-called friends, etc.  The only difference is that Robarts is married with children at the start of the book, so his priorities are maintaining his family rather than obtaining one in the first place.  This makes the story interesting, as it has a different focus for one of its plot strands.

Framley Parsonage is even more like a soap opera than the other Trollope books I've read.  The plot strands are many and only tenuously connected.  The main character and plot mentioned in the blurb on the back are not really featured all that much after the first hundred or so pages, and the focus shifts between lots of different characters, revisiting several from previous books in the series, as well.

It's still Trollope, and I still enjoyed it - there are genius character observations throughout, and some wonderful comments on society - but I felt perhaps he was starting to suffer from diminishing returns.