First, a warning: If you haven’t read any Trollope, start with The Warden; it’s the first in a series of which Barchester is second. Next, a rather shocking warning: Trollope may be as addictive as a soap opera. It has plenty of the right ingredients—archly drawn characters and plots that enmesh the listener in the daily ups and downs of those characters’ lives. Of course, the great crevasse that divides your average daytime soap from Barchester Towers is the elegance and skill of the writer and the witty invention from which he draws his charming and classic fantasies.
