Comfort reading is one of the few guilty pleasures one can indulge without fearing a doctor's warning in the pipeline.
Of course all reading is enjoyable for those who like that sort of thing, but some books fall into a category entirely their own when it comes to offering effortless delight and failsafe escapism.
As winter nights press down upon us, and the prospect of moving far from the boiler loses all appeal, I have laid down my own store of cold-weather reading to see me through till spring. For the past few months I have been slowly acquiring the works of Anthony Trollope, whose oeuvre is so extensive it could be prescribed as thermal insulation as well as first-class entertainment.
Fondly recalling that The Eustace Diamonds got me through a bout of flu in the week the Berlin Wall came down, I reached for the Chronicles of Barsetshire recently. It was not me who was coughing and spluttering, but I needed something to pass the time between doling out paracetamol and camomile tea. The Warden was where I began, and I could not have chosen better. This was not Trollope's first novel, but it was the one that gave his reputation the fillip it required.
Apparently it was a trip to Salisbury Cathedral that was the inspiration for this and the five subsequent titles that form the series featuring the fictional city of Barchester. Some time in the 1990s I was introduced to Salisbury by a Rear-Admiral who might have slotted seamlessly into the story, and whose house looked across the green towards the cathedral where nothing seemed to have changed in centuries. Thus the backdrop was not just familiar but it was easy to picture the period of which Trollope wrote with such barbed affection.
You don't need to have set foot in Salisbury, though, to appreciate the humour and humanity of The Warden or its satirical twin, Barchester Towers, which can fairly claim to be the most accurate depiction of the machinations of the English clergy ever written. A friend who once fell foul of politicking in the Kirk had never read either, but I suspect for him the ruthlessness and vaunting ambition it portrays will feel like kitchen sink realism.
Barchester Towers proved a turning point for Trollope. As he later wrote: "It achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon the read." However, despite being one of the most popular of authors by the time of his death in 1882, Trollope quickly fell out of favour. In part it was John Major's affection for him that helped resuscitate his name. Major was beguiled by his depiction of political manoeuvring among the landed and middle classes, and as Vice President of the Anthony Trollope Society he helped promote his work. In 1987 the first-ever complete edition of his 47 novels was put in train by the Folio Society, which I am hunting down one by one in secondhand bookshops.
Most critics stress that Trollope's literary style leaves a great deal to be desired. Certainly his is not the most polished of work, despite the best efforts of his wife, who copied out his first drafts, under instruction by her husband to tidy the text as she saw fit. Even so, the vigour and honesty of his prose is compelling. He cannot match Dickens for mood or brilliance or poetry, nor for the bitter sense of Paradise lost that haunts almost all of Dickens's stories. In some respects, though, he is his superior. Trollope's women are as complex, thoughtful and powerful as his men, and the world he creates is so real and nuanced it is impossible to imagine the author conjuring it out of nothing more than ink.
I've reached Dr Thorne, the third in the Barsetshire stable, and am informed by PD James's introduction that it was one of Trollope's best-loved books. It's hard to think it can better the first two, but 100 pages in I'm open to persuasion.
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