How long was The Pallisers? The longer it was, the more I'll like it; the whole series is just too many very, very long novels to be properly suited to anything less than, at bare minimum, a 5-hour series. IMO, anyway.

So much of Trollope's great value is in the small household details, the inner monologues and sidelong glances and brief dialogues, often between minor characters, that do almost nothing to advance the plot (which he considered his weak point as a writer) but illuminate the characters' inner lives and the rhythms of their daily lives, their connections to their parents and children, their marriages in all the long years after the big Victorian wedding. Start cutting for length, and pretty soon all you're left with is the skeleton of the plot. And Trollope's skeletons are kind of small and misshapen. All the fun is in the meat he puts on those bones.

In bookstores you'll every now and then come across copies of the "novelization" of the PBS series -- all the several thousand pages of meat stripped away and 500 cracked, dry, marrowless little pages of plot remaining. It's an abomination.

::looks at feet::

Huh. How on earth did that soapbox get there?

The longer it was, the more I'll like it; the whole series is just too many very, very long novels to be properly suited to anything less than, at bare minimum, a 5-hour series.

Definitely more than 5. I want to say it was 12 hours, but I may be off there.

And I like the way you describe the virtues of Trollope. Case in point -- The Prime Minister. Which begins with the parties forming a coalition government. The government is then pretty much forgotten, except as an excuse for the Duchess to throw lavish entertainments.

Definitely more than 5. I want to say it was 12 hours, but I may be off there.

It's in three complete box sets. So I think it might be more than 12.

Probably my faulty memory, then. I just remember that a co-worker loaned me about 6 videocassettes.

Heh, thanks, but I'm pretty much just spouting the Trollope fannish party line. He cheerfully copped to being a shitty plotter -- could not for the life of him do what Dickens did with the elaborate stories within stories within stories, the ability to keep six or seven subplots not only going simultaneously but weaving neatly in and out of one another, and the frequently occurring but rarely asspully HSQ.

Trollope focused instead on small human fuck-ups: the inappropriate crush you can't quite smother, the secret agonies of doubt, the words you want to take back even as they're sailing out your mouth, the quiet resentment, the pride you choke on, the badly mistaken promise you feel honor-bound to keep, with occasional forays into the deeper waters of disintegrating marriages and custody battles and what goes on in the mind of an upright, properly reared, very straitlaced person of name and money who commits violence against another human. He really couldn't plot, but he loved humans and their fucked-up, brave and foolish spicy brains and he was so very good at writing them down.

The Pallisiers is a 26-part series (50 minutes each).

The Pallisiers is a 26-part series (50 minutes each).

::swoons::

the frequently occurring but rarely asspully HSQ.

I beg your pardon! Asspully HSQ coincidences were the lifeblood of Dickens! Movie versions of his works always do the sudden hand-wavy thing in the middle, because the coincidences are so hard for a modern audience to swallow. (I enjoy them, in a "Oh no you didn't!" way, but they're like #3 on the "What not to do" list for novel-writing.)

I offer you my considered response: Nuh-uh!

I dunno. Dickens's HSQs and resolutions never feel asspully to me because they always feel emotionally true to the world he's created. They're fantastically coincidental, but his world is itself so fantastic that the HSQs don't ever ping me. They may be hard to swallow in a blunt real-world logical way, but seen through the Dickensverse lens they always feel (to me anyway) justified. I can't think of one occasion in which I felt like he'd written his way into a corner and yanked a coincidence ex cloaca to get himself out of it. They're improbable and absurd, but they always feel like something he had in the back of his mind from fairly early on, not something he seized on as a last resort.

I didn't like the prospective-husband-switchy thing at the end of Bleak House, but offhand that's the only HSQ that's felt wrong and unearned to me. (I was hugely relieved by it, but it still felt weirdly cheaty and manipulative.)

Dickens is great characters and a view of their society. As to plot, I once heard a parody of Oliver Twist that relied heavily on the phrase, "just happens to be," and ends with, "which means the whole things was ONE BIG COINCIDENCE!"

Trollope is actually a good storyteller when you realize that his forte is everyday people going through their everyday lives doing everyday things.