Dead Men's Boots, Barchester Towers

Dead Men's Boots is the third novel about exorcist Felix Castor, a series which I think is far and away the best of the urban noir subgenre (although I think Child of Fire gives it a run for the money).  Here Felix is embroiled in an investigation into the ghost of an American serial killer who somehow ended up possessing a man in London.

It's hard to overstate how well Carey has caught the cadences of the hard-boiled detective novel here.  Castor is not a detective, but he ends up playing that role.  Carey also throws a bit of a curve ball by making this a more optimistic novel than the previous two, which was a nice change.

I see that I read the previous Castor book at the same time as I read The Warden, Trollope's first novel about the town of Barchester.  So it's an odd coincidence that I read the second Barchester novel, Barchester Towers at the same time as the third Castor novel.  Here, Trollope moves into a more broadly comic vein, particularly once he hits his stride in volume II.  At first, I would have put Trollope as a distant third behind Dickens and George Elliot -- his humor isn't as broad as Dickens's, and his realism is not as well-observed as Elliot's.  But once he hit his stride, I could see why he's rated so highly

He shifts into high comic mode at some point, invoking the muse ("Tell me o muse of the wrath of Mr. Slope"), apostrophizing his heroes, and so on.  His extended similes also make his subjects ridiculous, whether by magnifying them (comparing marital discord to war between massive armies) or comparing them to insignificant things (that same marital discord is compared more than once to cocks fighting over a dunghill).  His deus ex machina (Dr Gwinn) is kept off-stage for most of the story with a broken ankle and arrives too late to do anything.

All this is a kind of humor we don't really find in Dickens, even though I found them superficially similar at first -- both writers write broad characters without a lot of depth.  They're mostly types rather than actual characters.  Trollope occasionally tries to give his people more depth, by explaining that their innermost motivations are not as villainous (or virtuous) as they appear, but the end result is much the same.  Mr. Slope may not be a complete hypocrite, for example, but his actions are nonetheless odious, and his better qualities never lead him to do anything actually good.  But Dickens's humor lies more in what his characters say & do, while much of Trollope's humor is in his narrative voice, like the above-mentioned epic prose.

I'm still finishing Barchester Towers as I write this, so I may have more to say later, but I don't think so, somehow.

On a side note, I've started The Faerie Queene.  At 1000 pages, I guess I'll be at it for a while...