Trollope's Golden Lion of Granpere

The Golden Lion of Granpere by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Famous authors can be notoriously insecure. They begin to wonder whether their success is based on continued excellence or if people just buy their books because their name has become a popular brand.

This apparently happened to Anthony Trollope in the mid-1860s when he was at the height of his fame, having just finished the Barsetshire series. So he decided to publish some books anonymously and see if they were as popular as, say, Doctor Thorne.

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that Doctor Thorne is, in the estimation of many people, his best book, so comparing it to anything else, let alone an anonymously published novel means little. But the main problem is that AT, whose novels range from 400 to 800 pages and more, wrote three very slim novels. And unlike any of his other novels they were set in Europe. The characters were not English. And two of the three were tragedies, with people throwing themselves off cliffs in despair and such. They could hardly be more different from the books that made him popular.

Not surprisingly, they flopped. In fact, nobody wanted to publish his third novel and it was only a journal that Trollope himself was editing that finally accepted The Golden Lion of Granpere.

The novel? Well, at least it's not one of the tragedies; it starts out as a sensible novel of an angry father, a proud son, and a reticent girl. The boy loves the girl, the girl loves the boy, and the father wants to separate them. For no good reason at all except his sense that he should be making these decisions in his own house.

From there the novel deteriorates to farce, and rather funny farce at that. A charming book, easy and quick reading, and entertaining.

One other problem. Trollope and his wife visited Alsace Lorraine in 1867 and he came home and wrote this book set there in France. But because of the difficulty finding a publisher he didn't get it published until 1872. And by then it had changed hands, you know . . .

2012 No 11

This is a repost of comments from an earlier reading.