The Warden

"He is. The Warden is interesting because, again, you don’t get that many books—at least not ones that I’ve come across—that have an old man as the protagonist. It’s the first of a set of six novels and I just happen to like Trollope anyway. It’s not the best book in the world and I don’t think it’s even the best Trollope. But he’s very good on the social interactions. The old man has an old friend who’s the bishop and the relationship between them is charming and done very well. He has a nice daughter who looks after him and another daughter who is married to an archdeacon and, my goodness, they bully the poor man! They are just convinced that they know what’s best for him. It’s a rather sweet portrayal of an old man and you just want them to leave him alone and stop telling him what to do. So it’s very interesting on intergenerational issues and how kids can sometimes be convinced that they know what’s best for Dad when really Dad would rather just get on with it. And, indeed, Dad does just get on with it and decides to do what’s right. They all think it’s a terrible idea and he goes and does it anyway. It’s a rather lovely book and an offer of hope for all those old people who are being bullied by their children. It’s kind of like Gilead in that it’s about faith and being true to yourself and people not understanding each other. But it’s a very different angle on it. I think it can. It plays a much bigger part in Gilead than in the Trollope. I think faith is a way of making sense of a very difficult thing. Psychologists call it ‘terror management’, the idea that we are going to stop existing and that that’s a very difficult idea for us to handle. Religion is one way to cope with that, but there are others. The idea of legacy is an often-used way of dealing with it—the idea that you go on in other people’s memories. You go on in the work you’ve left behind and in your children. That’s an alternative route that almost denies death by saying that there’s a little bit of you that will continue to live. Even people who are religious will use that route as well. The thing about old age is that it’s death that is foreseen—if it’s not a sudden or a violent death, you can get used to it and approach the idea. That’s also, I think, interesting. I think it’s partly the death—or the ageing—of parents, these days. You’re kind of caught because the kids have grown up and you’re not as much of a parent in the sense that you’re not there looking after them all the time. They’re fleeing the nest and so, in a sense, you’re losing one part of your function. And, yet, you’re having to reverse another part of your function, because you were a child and then you have to stop being a child and you have to grow up. And, of course, if you lose a parent then you do grow up and everything changes. So it’s a difficult time of life."

"The plot of The Warden has been a familiar one this year. It’s about middle-ranking, mostly decent people who have had financial privileges, which to them – in terms of their own internal logic and their own rules – are absolutely OK. Then there’s a protest and a leak. The Times gets hold of the story and suddenly everything is upside down… There are no bad people in The Warden. The comparison with our own MPs is quite telling. The top churchmen always had most of the money once bequeathed to support the local pensioners. They justify that to themselves on the grounds that the church should make its own rules, and that society was better if it did. And only when it was given a harsh write-up in the press did it become clear that the internal, moral logic that they thought was perfectly fine actually wasn’t. And the warden loses his job, even though the whistleblower takes pity on him, goes to the man at The Times and says, look, can we call this whole thing off? And, of course, he can’t, because the thing by that stage had its own media momentum. It’s always good to learn from critics of newspapers. Sometimes newspaper people feel that everyone is getting at them. In fact, newspaper editors do have a great deal of power, and it is sometimes possible to put abstract principles above the ordinary good. It’s always possible to forget the effect of what you are writing on the people you are writing about. However much newspaper editors try to stay close to their readers and to ordinary life, the prospect of becoming a distant figure is always there. The fictional editor of The Jupiter wasn’t called Tom Towers for nothing. He may not have been exactly in an ivory tower, but he was not easy to meet. And the notion that he could send off “the thunderbolt” from so far away was what upset Trollope so much, the power to fire and forget at no risk to yourself. Now, I’m not saying that Trollope was correct, or that what Tom Towers does in The Warden wasn’t exactly the right thing to do – I’m sure it was – but, what Trollope explains is the effect the newspaper has not just on “bad people”, the people cleaning their moats at public expense, but the people doing things they thought were ordinary. There’s a clear link with what happened over the MPs’ expenses scandal last autumn: good people are dragged down with the bad. It is a nuanced book, which draws attention to that, and a good one for any editor to read."