Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the monumental Barsetshire sequence, a self-evident masterpiece that is at once universal and fascinating in its specificity. The Last Chronicle develops new stories of its own whilst neatly wrapping up various strands from earlier volumes, although not necessarily in a crowd-pleasing or expected manner. As always, a sense of Trollope’s humanism shines through, with even the least attractive characters, such as the memorably odious Mrs Proudie, eliciting a small amount of sympathy.

The closing scenes, describing the funeral of a favourite character, are moving both for their content and due to a sense of a great project coming to a close. Several thousand pages of joyful reading come to a close, but the Palliser novels are something to anticipate with relish.