Can You Forgive Her - Audiobook

Synopsis: Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora - forced to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald from wasting her vast fortune. In asking his readers to pardon Alice for her transgression of the Victorian moral code, Trollope created a telling and wide-ranging account of the social world of his day.

Review: Can I forgive her? ... no, not really. Alice has a perfectly lovely fiancé in John Grey, he's handsome, considerate, wealthy, kind etc etc etc .. a real gentleman. On the other hand, her cousin George .. who she was once engaged to until he behaved badly ... is profligate, ambitious, ruthless and self centred. Yet, still, Alice is wavering, and she decides she can't marry John Grey. And her reasoning seems to be that .... wait for it ... he's too good for her!! All of her friends and relations, except for George's sister Kate, are exasperated with her and she's bombarded on all sides by disapproving looks and letters. Eventually she is persuaded (mostly by Kate) to become engaged to George again, she soon sees that she doesn't really love him but she can't be a jilt again! She begins to view the engagement as a sort of pennance for being so wicked and turning down a man as worthy as John Grey. George has political ambitions and needs money to advance his interests and Alice has plenty of it which he is desirous of obtaining. Alice is like a martyr, dishing out money like a cashcard machine to a man who doesn't give three straws for her and who, if left to his own devices, will soon spend every penny she possesses. In the meantime, John Grey ... a sort of personality cross between Mr Darcy and Colonel Brandon ... remains steadfast and loyal and hopes for a reconciliation (the idiot!)

I would accuse Alice of being the most infuriatingly stubborn and slappable literary heroine ever if it wasn't for Trollope's other creation Lily Dale who must always take the title of 'heroine you most want to shake until their teeth fall out'. There is no competition, I can't even think of Lily without foaming at the mouth. I've read all of Trollope's 'Barchester' novels and loved them but this is my first 'Palliser' novel. I love his style of writing, a cross between the descriptive and comic style of Dickens (although he never quite strays into Dickensian absurdity) and the narrative style of Thackeray. I love also how the characters from his novels are always popping up in the background of subsequent stories .. in this book there were appearances from characters that I know from his Barchester novels, such as the gloriously named Duke of Omnium.

The second main narrative concerns Lady Glencora, a cousin of Alice's, who is married to the kindly but serious Plantagenet Palliser. They are not very well matched, Glencora is fun loving and witty whereas Plantagenet is a rather stuffy politician. Like Alice, Glencorra had once been engaged to someone else, the more exciting and dashing Burgo but the same relatives that were outraged at Alice's conduct concerning John Grey persuaded Glencora to abandon Burgo and marry Plantagenet. She finds life with him boring and suffocating and soon regrets her decision, she begins to think about Burgo and fosters secret hopes of an elopement. Alice stays with Lady Glencora often and each tries to help, or persuade, the other as to the correct (as they see it) course of action.

The third narrative, and the most comic, involves another relative, Kate and Alice's Aunt Greenow. She was married to a rich elderly man, but now that he's dead she has been left a wealthy widow. She has a couple of ardent suitors in Mr Cheeseacre and Captain Bellfield. On the one hand Mr Cheesacre is a farmer and wealthy (which he can't help but point out nearly everytime he opens his mouth .. just as he can't help pointing out that Captain Bellfield hasn't a shilling) on the other hand Captain Bellfield, though penniless, is more charismatic and charming. It's great fun seeing these two former friends fight it out for the love of the widow (who, despite constantly dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief at the mere thought of her dear departed husband, manages to fast track her mourning period by the simple expedient of continually adding several months to those that have actually passed.)

Sometimes Trollope can get a bit bogged down with detail and there are parts of the book that drag. This was helped considerably though by the excellent reading of Timothy West who is the perfect narrator for Trollope's novels .. and Thackeray's too.

The only thing that makes me think that I may forgive Alice is that disc number two of my unabridged audiobook wouldn't work in any of my CD players, it happened that disc two followed the account of Alice's trip to Switzerland with her cousin Kate chaperoned by George. This trip must have been the catalyst for her subsequent decisions but all I know of it is that by disc three she was home again and her experiences abroad were only vaguely mentioned. Something happened though on a balcony somewhere which changed her mind and perhaps that something was that George slipped some mind altering drug or other into her glass of wine. If that's the case I might forgive her but without this evidence ... then no.