When, realizing I had somehow missed Trollope entirely in the past, I downloaded his complete works, I must admit I wasn't expecting the first novel I read to be a rather grim fable about social troubles in Ireland. Subsequent perusal of the first few chapters of his autobiography give the reason: he spent a good part of his twenties working for the Post Office there. Trollope gives fair warning of his unhappy ending by introducing his story with a picture of the desolate abandoned estate, Ballycloran (based on a visit to a real estate). He made his protagonist, Thady, attractive enough however that I continued to hope quite late in the proceedings that he would escape the death penalty for killing the obnoxious bully who was making off with Thady's fallible sister, Feemie. (Feemie herself died the death of the fallen woman, though it appears it was miscarriage rather than grief, which is at least a bit more realistic). However, at the end of the day the novel suffers from a dearth of really engaging characters. The Catholic priest, Father John, got a much more sympathetic portrayal than I expected, but even he comes across as ineffective. Trollope refuses to ally his narrative voice with Catholic or Protestant, tenant or landlord, and in this he is more sophisticated than most "Ireland" authors I have read, most of whom have a sectarian axe to grind. My principal concern with the unfolding of the plot (of which Trollope was apparently proud) was the heavy implication that had Thady been judged only on the personal motives that caused him to kill, he would have got off, but he was railroaded because he also got mixed up, briefly, with a political plot to kill the same unpopular fellow, who was 'liquor police'. This muddling seems to me to sidestep the ethical issues of both violence in defence of female relatives, when their virtue is under attack or perceived attack, and the class inequalities which led to the tenantry indulging in wholesale moonshinery. Still, it was a first novel, and I am engaged enough to move on to his more mature work.
