detracting coincidences in TWWLN

[kev67]

The Way We Live Now is my first Trollope book. It is pretty good so far. Like every other author of this era, he has his own style, which reminds me more of W.M. Thackeray's than anyone else's. One thing that weakens the story is that there are some whopping coincidences that push the plot along. There is an American woman who possibly committed an act of violence in Oregon, yet a fellow passenger on the ship to Liverpool remembered her name and the incident and thought she might be the same woman. I suppose her photograph may have been in the paper, but America is a pretty big place. Worse, she just happens to rent a room in a house at which another young woman has run away from home to. Both these young women are known to another character who comes to the house. Out of all the hundreds' of thousands of London houses why would these two women stay at the same house? In a Dickens book it would not matter so much because he does not really pretend to write realistic plots, but up to the point these women show up, TWWLN had seemed quite realistic.

[kev67]

I have nearly finished the book now. It is a great book and the only things that bother me a bit concern Mrs Hurtle, the American woman. I think Trollope tried his best, but he had a problem bringing Mrs Hurtle and Ruby Muggles (the country girl) together. He relied on a whopping great coincidence here. It is a shame, because I expect he could have plotted a more realistic way, but maybe he felt he could not spare the time. Secondly, I still think America is a big place and Mrs Hurtle's romantic difficulties would not have become widespread knowledge. Lastly, but I think this is an oversight that might easily be explained away, Hetta Carbury knows Mrs Hurtle's address - how? Did she ask her brother, Felix? Did Paul Montesgue write down her address? Did she have a copy of the Yellow Pages or some equivalent?