Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You need a special kind of man who understands the way we live now to lead you into that new world of peace and prosperity.", 18 Sep 2007
Often considered Trollope's greatest novel, this satire of British life, written in 1875, leaves no aspect of society unexamined. Through his large cast of characters, who represent many levels of society, Trollope examines the hypocrisies of class, at the same time that he often develops sympathy for these characters who are sometimes caught in crises not of their own making. Filling the novel with realistic details and providing vivid pictures of the various settings in which the characters find themselves, Trollope also creates a series of exceptionally vibrant characters who give life to this long and sometimes cynical portrait of those who move the country.
Lady Carbury, her innocent daughter Henrietta (Hetta), and her attractive but irresponsible son Felix are the family around which much of the action rotates. They are always in need of money and Lady Carbury writes pap novels to support the family (and Felix's drinking and gambling). In contrast to the Carburys, and just as important to the plot, are the Melmottes. Augustus Melmotte, who has come from Vienna under a cloud of financial suspicions, has acquired a huge estate for himself, his foreign wife, and his marriageable daughter. Boorish, but determined to become a leader of society, Melmotte provides moments of humor for the reader, though he is scorned by an aristocracy which is nevertheless beholden to him for his investments.
When Melmotte becomes the major investor in a plan to build a railway from California to Mexico, Paul Montague, a handsome engineer who has been working in America, arrives in town. A ward of Roger Carbury, cousin of Felix and Hetta, he soon finds himself in love with Hetta--and in competition with Roger for her hand. Felix courts the Melmottes' daughter for her fortune, and she falls in love with him while he dallies with a local domestic worker. Investors dash to buy shares in the Mexican railway, and their investments ending in the sticky hands of Melmotte, who has bigger plans.
Often addressing the reader directly, Trollope fills the novel with action and subplots which illustrate a wide variety of themes, often depicting his characters satirically to illustrate the social, political, and financial ills of the day. Ahead of his time for his depiction of the lively, intelligent woman whose role is defined (and limited) by her social and financial position, Trollope creates a number of resourceful women--and a number who are willing to do almost anything to marry a wealthy man. As is customary in Victorian novels, the good are rewarded here, and the evil are punished, but Trollope's characters, unlike those by Dickens, for example, usually control their own destinies. Broad in scope, thoughtful in construction, complete in its depiction of 1870s' England, filled with wonderful characters, and absolutely engrossing to read, The Way We Live Now is one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. Mary Whipple
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Way We STILL Live Now, 12 April 1998
By A Customer
Picture a world in which a shadowy entreprenour rubs shoulders with the great and powerful, while hard-driving yuppies stop at nothing to be associated with his schemes. Sounds like Ron Reagan's "Morning in America," doesn't it? Except it is Victorian London. The entreprenour is Auguste Melmotte. The yuppies are the scions of great and small families hurling themselves at his daughter, his phantasmagorical railway (between Salt Lake City and Vera Cruz yet!) company, and the hem of his cloak. And the book is Anthony Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Like all of Trollope's books, this one is as well crafted as any by Eliot or Thackeray; yet the theme and handling are strikingly modern. I came to this book by way of the Barsetshire novels with their depiction of rural clergy. I should have read THE WAY WE LIVE NOW first. Especially worth noting are the surprisingly full characterizations of Marie Melmotte, daughter of the financier, who is courted by her emotional inferiors, and Roger Carbury, a rural landowner who holds aloof from the fray and helps several of the others pick up the pieces from their lives. The only negative is the book's anti-semitism, though it makes several attempts to lift itself from this charge.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Homo hominis lupus, then as now, 27 Jan 2009
About a year ago I read my first novel by Trollope, 'The Warden'. Somehow, that book captivated me to such a degree that I went on to read all Barshetshire-novels, all Palliser-novels, 'He knew he was right', Trollope's autobiography, to end now with 'The way we live now'. And invariably, I found myself sucked right into the story by the very 'commons sense' (but at the same time very lucid) analysis Trollope makes of his characters' inner feelings and motivations. You may like or dislike his characters, but you are sure to 'understand' them: why they are the way they are and act the way they do.
Is it perhaps because this has become so uncommon in (post-)modern novels that Trollope's books are so charming, so extremely likeable? There's no subterfuge, no need for deep probing (not to say guesswork) into the characters' motivations, Trollope all spells it out clearly for his readers.
Titles say a lot about books, and this is no exception. 'The way we live now' says exactly what Trollope sets out to do: a depiction - and a rather depressing one at that - of the morals of his present day. And it's all the more depressing because of the 'we'... it's not they way 'they' live, no, Trollope readily (and to my mind correctly) addresses all of his contemporaries, and us too.
I will not go into detail about what actually happens in the novel. Suffice it to say that virtually every single character in the book - whether high or low class - is motivated by the kind of emotions we love to condemn (preferably in others): greed, jealousy, deceit, narcisism, egotism, ... and will stop at nothing to satisfy his or her self-interest. The 'Great Financier' Augustus Melmotte (as he is mockingly called by one of his adversaries) is a cheat, a swindler and a a forger and yet - though rumours are rife about his practices - is received by virtually all of London society, because he is wealthy. The young men in the novel waste their time in their club (they are, quite literally, 'a waste of space'), and many of the women too will scheme and lie to reach their goals. Marriage is thought of as a business transaction: the men marrying themselves into money, and the women into high society. Even with the few 'good' characters in the book, Trollope shows us how hard they sometimes struggle to do what they know is right, not to lower themselves to the moral standard everybody around them seems to adhere to.
All in all, a bleak picture of the human race, and 'the way we live now'. As far removed as it may be in time from our present day, the most depressing insight is perhaps that nothing much, if anything, has changed since then. The world is still peopled by 'great financiers', and to what lengths they will go to make a profit has - once again, and probably not for the last time - been proven by the worldwide crisis of the financial markets we witness today.
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