Product Description

Phineas Finn, a red-blooded young Irishman is elected to Parliament by his local borough. In London he wins the love of the influential Lady Laura Kennedy. His career advances, but this is secondary to the social and sexual intrigues that beset him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1099968 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Customer Reviews

Handsome and charming and full of surprises
The second novel in the Palliser's series, Phineas Finn follows the story of an Irish Member of the British Houses of Parliament from humble beginnings as the son of a doctor through the aristocratic and political salons of the mid-19th century.

Finn is something of a ladies man but Trollope writes him beautifully as someone who seems to blunder accidentally into good fortune and an interest in several women without the faintest trace of self-knowledge. He is unassuming, charming, deliciously shallow and, we are told, handsome to look at. Men and women alike are taken in by him.

Trollope as always slowly builds the many strands of his story from the start. But as you read on through, the narrative gathers pace until it is bowling hypnotically along with its own momentum. After the first 200 pages it becomes unputdownable as events and personalities unfold sometimes as you thought they would, and other times ending in surprise.

My favourite charcter became Lord Chiltern. He grew on me every time he appeared. He's a plain-speaking, unsophisticated man who has gained a reputation for being violent and difficult but gradually I began to wonder how much was truth and how much hearsay. He is the anti-thesis of the charming but deceptive Phineas Finn. Chiltern is disliked while Finn is admired and favoured by the same people and so Trollope makes his point that what you see isn't always what you get.

Excellent and under-rated Trollope novel
Phineas Phinn is one of Trollope's best characters - attractive, charming, ambitious and passionate, he starts the book as a young man falling into fortune, but matures throughout the novel.

A typical Victorian book, Phineas's relationships with three very different women are described in exquisite psychological detail.

Read this for a view of Victorian politics, for the relationships between men and women, for an analysis of the role of money in society - or simply as a rivetting, unputdownable story.

The sequel, Phineas Redux, is much darker and must be read straight after.

Charming and thought-provoking
This, the second novel in Trollope's Palliser-novels, is as good as one has grown to expect from such an immaculate novelist as Trollope.

Phineas is a penniless Irishman (his father being a modest country doctor) who, against all expectations (including his own) is elected to the British Parliament. This not only introduces him to the political world of the day (which Trollope describes with great acumen and at times sarcasm) but also to London society, where Phineas soon becomes a favorite. But before long Phineas is faced with two dilemmas. In his political life he has to decide whether, having become a government employee, it is his duty to always vote as the government does or to follow his own judgement (perhaps at the cost of his job). In his private life he is torn between staying true to his Irish childhood-love and (since she is penniless too) forsaking his dreams of a grand political career, or to dump her for one of the London heiresses...

The whole story is masterly told by Trollope whose style, once you've been introduced to it, is ever so charming and really like no other. I've been charmed and seduced by every single novel of his I've read so far and this one is no exception. Thoroughly recommended!