Read by David Shaw ( )

”I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss.”


"When I see women kiss, I always think that there is a deep hatred at the bottom of it.”

And so the long, arduous, fitful, endearing, maddening, and epic-filled Chronicles of Barsetshire are at an end… and it’s a glorious end that my four-star rating can’t truly reflect, unless you’ve read them all in order and in fairly quick succession. It feels, in many ways, like the end of an era; the close of a century. 



As is usual with Trollope, he takes his time to set the stage; but since most of his novels in the Barsetshire series are not as long as this, the last, one, here he takes triple the amount of time: where he normally needs about a hundred-or-so pages to set the preliminary characters into motion, in The Last Chronicle it takes him nearly three-hundred pages to do so. Some of this is awkward and clumsy, with quite a bit of redundant scenes toward the beginning of the novel, especially as he attempts to gain the reader’s sympathy for poor Josiah Crawley, a perpetual curate (and an unlikely protagonist for this, but, as it turns out, the perfect one) who is accused of stealing a check for £20.



Many of the characters that populate The Last Chronicle appear in the previous four books, but especially from Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington—and, of course, the fire-cracking Mrs. Proudie, whose shenanigans make Barchester Towers the comical tour de force that it is, even though it’s a bit of an outsider when taken with the rest of the Barsetshire books. Lily Dale and John Eames return, Dr. Thorne and Mr. Harding… it’s much fanfare for the swan song, and it’s as thrilling to read this closure to a world that only Trollope could make seem so real as it is to leave it behind, tucked coolly on the bookshelf to delve into in perhaps another decade or so. 



Love, romance, deceit, gossip, back-stabbings, and several twists and turns that show Trollope is at his finest, wanting quite obviously—but successfully—to end the series with a flourish and a great deal of lament and remembrance. The sole reason for the four-star rating is the very slow and clumsy start of the book; it seems that Trollope knew exactly what he was doing (when does he not?), but that in dealing with this many characters and more subplots than any previous Barsetshire novel, he couldn’t settle on where the focus was. 



While many readers below suggest that this (or any) of the books could be read as standalone novels, I would disagree: one really needs to see the progression of the characters; the different ways and great lengths to which Trollope goes in his world-building of this fictional place that, by the end, feels like such a real world inhabited by real people; and one needs a lot of the backstories from the previous two novels especially to really understand Lily, John, Grace, and some of the other characters’ transformations across time and space. (For a good Trollope standalone, might I suggest The Claverings?)

Definitely read these in order, slowly: this is a series to be savored, and read again and again. This is my second time reading the series; it will definitely not be my last. ( )

Very long but it mostly didn't outstay its welcome. A final wrap up of all those Barsetshire characters and there was at least one scene at end that gave me tears in my eyes. Mr Crawley was a very strange character - almost autistic at a time when such a diagnosis would not have existed.
The whole Lily Dean and John Eames saga got a go around again and another conclusion. I never expected to like Trollope when my reading group first tackled "The Warden" but I do. Will carry on reading him. ( )

I'm so sorry that this is the end of this series. I'm tempted to go back and start at the beginning again. David Shaw Parker is a wonderful narrator. These books are real comfort reads for me. Great depth, wonderful characters, great play of language in a world I love to visit. Beautifully done. ( )

There are some slow stretches in the intervening chronicles between Barchester Towers and the Last Chronicle, but this makes up for it. In fact, you can probably just skip straight over the middle books unless you really like Trollope. I do. ( )