This is the weakest novel in the Palliser series because the protagonist, Phineas Finn, is a trifling, uninteresting person. He is a young man with political ambitions but no money, so he runs around London trying to foist himself on some rich woman who can finance his career. Phineas Finn’s superficiality makes his endless “fallings in love” with one woman after another feel quite repetitive.
By the end of this coming-of-age novel, Phineas is thirty and finally, with enormous effort and endless whining, manages not to be a complete toad. That’s a great achievement for him but fails to impress readers used to Trollope’s complicated, deep, and admirable male characters.
It’s still a good novel that I enjoyed because of the humor, the language, and the quirky portrayal of England’s political system. But I hope nobody makes it the first Trollope novel they read because it’s not representative of how strong the rest of his writing is.
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