Barchester

I spent last week in Barchester, the cathedral town of Barchestshire County, in the south of England. You didn't know I was away? Not only had I left Brooklyn but I had also departed from the 21st century. I had been transported to the middle of the 19th.

Barchester and Barchestershire are, of course, the fictional creation of Anthony Trollope, and it was Barsetshire Towers that temporarily removed me from Brooklyn. It's fiction, yes, but its characters and their surroundings are so convincing that it seduced and bewitched me, providing the illusion that I was personally present at each scene. Even after I had finished reading the novel I worried about some of the characters. What will become of the handsome, feckless Bertie Stanhope and his sister, the crippled femme fatale, Madeleine Neroni, when their father dies? He is their sole source of support, and his income, from church sinecures, dies with him. They have no money of their own and no realistic prospect of earning any. What will they do? Trollope didn't tell us. It doesn't matter, I guess, since Bertie and Madeleine must have died long ago. That they never existed is irrelevant. They are real to me.

This was the second time I'd read the novel, yet I'd forgotten many delightful details. I had forgotten, for instance, that the ancestor of the unctious Obadiah Slope was Dr. Slop, "that eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy." And I had even forgotten crucial scenes, such as the garden party at which the heroine receives marriage proposals from two unwelcome suitors and then quarrels with the man she loves. Such details and scenes were totally new to me, as if I had never read them before. Rereading the novel was like entering the home of a beloved friend, where I've spent many a pleasant evening, only to notice a vase. I ask my friend if it is new and he tells me that he inherited it from his parents and that it's always been there.

When you reread a masterpiece like Barchester Towers, you can savor the writing and pause to consider how the author manages his effects. You don't have to rush through the book to find out what happens next because you remember more or less the broad outline of the story. And of course you've enlarged your experience since the last time you've read it, so in some sense it becomes a different book.

Barchester Towers is the second of five novels in the Barchester series, employing many of the same characters from novel to novel. If you haven't read any of them, I envy you, for you have a treat in store. And if you have read them, you know what I mean.