The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (Penguin)
The pentultimate book in the Palliser series, The Prime Minister is a novel with two vaguely intersecting narratives: the first deals with Ferdinand Lopez and his courtship and marriage to Emily Wharton. He’s a foreigner of dubious birth, possibly Semetic, and possessing indeterminate financial wealth; she is a dutiful, beautiful, responsible young woman raised in all that is proper and respectably English, and their marriage is a disaster — all he wants is her father’s money. The second half of the narrative concerns Plantagenet Palliser’s brief term as Prime Minister, and Duchess Glencora’s concurrent run as the PM’s wife. Plantegenet is sober, dutiful, and therefore mostly ineffective, while Glencora tries to create a brilliant and exclusive social circle around the PM with rather distastrous results. Perhaps not the best or most coherent and compelling of the Palliser (or Trollope’s) novels, but an engaging and entertaining read nonetheless, thanks to the brio and wit of Lady Glencora and her friend Madame Goesler, who has the great good fortune to be married to the fabulous Phineas Finn, my favorite male character in literature (from a sexual and moral point of view).
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