Orley Farm: Trollope 1993

One of Trollope's more melancholy novels. He wraps things up nicely at the end but you must have patience.

Trollope was a master of the domestic situation. There is a scarcity of dialogue in Orley Farm, but the detailed explanations of the emotions, surroundings, and background of each character offers so much more than dialogue ever could. Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm is by far the best fictionalized trial drama that I have ever read. One would be hard-pressed to find another like it.I would offer the warning to those who dislike long, tedious readings that this work would not be for them. It is nearly 850 pages with very little action/dialogue. It more a study into the human psyche as it relates to guilt, pity, law, and the moral implications of all these things.

Orley is simply timeless. Just as in the Palliser series, the characters are the people all around you, in the office, in the news, and on the tube. Trollope's ability to understand the subtle differences that shape the mind of men and women is simply uncanny. If you are a truth seeker, this is a book for you. Anyone with exposure to a legal system with its basis in the English common law will understand the perceptive analysis it is subjected to in Orley Farm. The distinction between evil deeds and the often sympathetic humans that are their authors is one that modern American culture often forgets to make. Orley Farm is here to remind us. As a trusts and estates lawyer, I can not believe that I practiced for fifteen years before someone told me about this gem.

Orley Farm is Trollope at his most profound, and his most entertaining. It is difficult to ascertain what is best in this novel: the subtle, incisive examination of how legal systems cannot be impartial and, more fundamentally, how humankind looks after its own regardless of right and wrong; or the episodic journey with some of Trollope's most memorable (and always three dimensional) characters - the 'wrong' but completely empathic Lady Mason, the fiercely honourable Sir Peregrine Orme, the virile young Peregrine Orme and, most memorably, the gentle overwhelmed but staunchly loyal Mrs Orme - undergoing the pangs of Trollope's drama amidst ancient piles, undulating hedgerows and sequestered English fields.

Orley Farm is Trollope at his best (as good as the Barsetshire series), which means some of the best characterizations in the English language. Trollope's people are real; the beleaguered Lady Mason, charged with forging a will; the aged lover Sir Peregrine Orme; Madeleine Stavely, deeply but practically in love; the shallow, fickle Sophia Furnival and others are 3-dimensional figures that live and breathe. His satire of the so-called "justice" system is the best kind of satire: he just describes the court proceedings as they really are. The result is as up-to-date as today's newspaper. It is no wonder that Trollope's revival in popularity is continuing to grow.

An absorbing portrayal of a woman who is charged with forging a will. The reader doesn't know whether or not the woman is guilty until the middle of the book, and although the author indicates that we shouldn't have been surprised the revelation, I certainly was. The novel also has multiple subplots all of which are excellently carried on. We learn about the lives and interests of lawyers, country gentlemen, 'commercial men' (traveling salespeople) and the women in their lives.