Trollope at War

NORTHBRIDGE RECTORY-Angela Thirkell-Knopf ($2.50).

No Trollope is Angela Thirkell. She is a Trollope imitator. She has taken over his literary pace (the mild meander), his mythical landscape (Barsetshire), his preoccupation with clergymen, his ability to go on writing the same book about the same people and place without boring his fans.

Northbridge Rectory, the latest Thirkell, reports Barsetshire during the Battle of Britain. Its large cast of small-town Britons is so very whimsical, lovable and British that they constantly threaten to slip into vaudeville (but never quite do). Nothing in particular happens to any of them. But the day-to-day record of their semi-humorous plane-watchings, their quiet contempt for "our little friend with the moustache," their unruffled adjustments to blackouts, to ill-mannered evacuees, to billeted officers, to shoddy goods "which, if we describe them as Empire, will be sufficiently described," to food shortages and to death's imminence make this one of the most plausible novels about Britain at war.

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