Wheels Within Wheels

ORLEY FARM (729 pp.) -- Anthony Trollope--Knopf ($5).

"Most of those among my friends who ... are competent to form an opinion say that this is the best I have written," said Anthony Trollope of his eleventh novel. "The plot is probably the best I have ever made ... I do not know that there is a dull page in the book. I am fond of Orley Farm."

Publisher Knopf has been fond enough himself of Orley Farm to put it first on the list of Trollope's works with which he plans to continue the current Trollope revival. Readers should not, as Trollope himself warned them, get the impression that Orley Farm is all about "cream-cheeses, pigs with small bones, wheat sown in drills, or artificial manure." As roomy as a barracks, as thickly populated as a small village, Orley Farm is one of the least bucolic, least loose-jointed of all his placid, jog-trotting accounts of life in the quiet Victorian countryside.

In an Old Trunk. As a rule Trollope wrote his novels as lustily and naturally as he hunted a fox--plunging ahead full tilt, changing course where & when he or his quarry pleased, never knowing nor caring what insurmountable fence or un-jumpable ditch might pop up in the next chapter. Inspiration, he was always the first to insist, had nothing to do with it. He got up every morning at 5:30 and wrote with calm assurance until breakfast, after which he took up his duties as a hard-working civil servant in the Post Office. When he had written enough for one book, he simply wrapped up the loose ends as best he could, reached for another sheet of paper and began the next. But in Orley Farm, the plot of which was so dear to his heart, he seems for once to have figured out the whole long run in advance.

When the book begins, heroine Lady Mason is a loved and lovely widow, long domiciled at Orley Farm. Over 20 years have passed since her aged husband, on his deathbed, bequeathed the farm to their infant son. Or so the legal world had always believed--and would have continued to believe, had not young Lucius Mason, on taking over the old farm at the age of 22, brusquely brought to an end a certain Mr. Dockwrath's tenancy of two of the Orley fields.

Mr. Dockwrath was a sly, vindictive man. He was also a shrewd country lawyer. When he was kicked out of Orley he retorted by digging into an old trunk and producing a couple of legal documents that threatened ruin to Lady Mason and her impetuous son.

Over Lukewarm Water. By the time the white-faced widow is haled before a grim judge and jury, Author Trollope has haled half of England into his novel--including the principals and extras in no less than five love affairs, a motley crew of traveling salesmen, the members of a local fox hunt, enough learned barristers and shyster lawyers (with their families and friends) to pack a small courthouse. He has also piled in so much legal lumber that a lawyer has been chosen to introduce the new edition.

Trollope's dovetailing of all this material into a single major plot of slowly mounting drama is an awesome feat. More typically Trollopian are his incidental, illuminating comments on the normal and everyday: on a country squire ("He endeavored to enable his tenants and laborers to live"); of British hotel coffee ("An unlimited supply of lukewarm water poured over an infinitesimal proportion of chicory"). Trollope's unaccustomed passion for plot is no substitute for more such salty asides, dry touches of humor, and lore of human kind.

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