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Customer Review: The Perils of Fecklessness
Normally, I would recommend that a new Trollope reader would start with one of the longer novels like BARCHESTER TOWERS or THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Although it is atypical for a Trollope novel, AN EYE FOR AN EYE is short, rather elegantly written, and a good book to read if you have no intentions of tackling the entire 47-novel Trollope canon.
The aging Earl of Scroope finds it necessary to adopt a young relative by the name of Fred Neville as his heir. Because the bane of his family has been heirs marrying beneath them, he makes the young lieutenant swear to wed someone worthy of carrying on the Scroope line "sans reproche" (without reproach), which is the family motto.
On a visit back to his barracks in Ireland, Neville decides to hire a boat and go shooting seals and seagulls. On the shore, atop the stunning Cliffs of Moher, he meets an attractive Irish widow and her beautiful daughter Kate. Naturally, he falls in love with the daughter despite rumors of an inappropriate father who was supposed to be dead.
The action swings like a pendulum between Scroope Manor and the Cliffs of Moher. At one location, the Earl and his wife make him promised to find a suitable mate; at the other, Kate and her mother -- with the help of the old local priest Father Marty -- work on joining Fred and Katie in Holy Matrimony.
Fred never can entirely make up his find. The final solution is some sort of bogus affair, in which Kate does not become Lady Scroope, involving perhaps a hushed-up marriage abroad. Naturally, this pleases no one.
Without divulging the ending, we find Fred paying the price for his wishy-washiness. A classical tragedy in the mold of his earlier LINDA TRESSEL, AN EYE FOR AN EYE is well worth reading under any circumstances. It tends to stand sui generis, so don't expect it to resemble his most famous works.
Product Description
This book is about the seduction of a young girl by the heir to an earldom, the resulting illegitimate pregnancy, and the young nobleman's struggle to decide whether to marry or to abandon the girl-certainly not the usual content of Victorian novels.
Customer Review: Overlooked, for a reason
I love Trollope, but this one is in a different, much lower, league from the Barsetshire or Palliser novels. It has a skeleton of a plot, with no subplots or secondary characters of interest.
Customer Review: An Eye for an Eye
I disagree with one of the other reviewers that this book is a "light read." It is assuredly not in the comic vein of most of Trollope's novels and it is, if anything, "heavy" indeed! It is cast in the mold of a classical tragedy with the hero conflicted between his duty to his family and his duty to the woman he loves. Trollope dearly loves to place his characters in such a bind, but this time it doesn't have a happy ending as is so often the case. It is thus atypical of Trollope's novels,though it does reveal the author's romantic preference for love over duty. In many ways this may be his most powerful statement for that preference as love does not win out in the end. I strongly recommend it, but as with one of the other reviewers, not as a first taste of Trollope. The book is quite different from most of his many other novels.
Customer Review: Quick, interesting read
Eye for an Eye has an immature young man making rather a mess of his first entree into adult opportunities. The book is a jaunty, interesting run to a conclusion--a reminder that immature behavior by a young adult can have unforeseen consequences. Many of the devices of Trollope's comic novels are here, but they subserve a plot which resolves in a decidedly non-comic fashion. A light read, an interesting commentary, and a social frankness that does not seem at all old fashioned. Trollope was not always an ardent critic of his own social order, but he understood the problems, as this book shows in a non-preachy way.
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