Résumé
Résumé de La Période fixe
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love short Victorian fiction with a sharp edge, early dystopian stories, and arguments about ageing and death.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Fixed Period is a short novel by Anthony Trollope, published in 1882, the year he died. Trollope is best known for the Barchester and Palliser novels, which are quiet studies of English clergymen and politicians. Here he does something unusual for him. He looks ahead to the year 1980 and invents a small island nation called Britannula, a former British colony in the southern seas near New Zealand.
The story is told by the nation's president, John Neverbend. He is proud of one great reform, the Fixed Period. Under this law, every citizen will be allowed a year of comfort at a college and then be put painlessly to death at the age of sixty-seven and a half. Neverbend believes this will spare people the misery of old age. You get a comic and uneasy tale about a man whose logic runs ahead of his heart. First, let us see the world he has built.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Britannula, an island built on reasonFree
- 2The Fixed Period and its confident logic
- 3Crasweller, the friend who comes due
- 4Family, love and a son who disagrees
- 5What the satire is really about
- 6How Trollope tells it
Point clé 1 sur 6
Britannula, an island built on reason
The story opens in a future that Trollope's first readers would have found strange. It is 1980, and Britannula is a self-governing state, once a part of the British Empire. Its capital is Gladstonopolis, a name that gently teases the English politics Trollope knew so well. The people are proud, practical and fond of new ideas.
The narrator, John Neverbend, is the president. His very name tells you something. He is a man who will never bend, once he has made up his mind. His voice is calm, self-assured and often unaware of how it sounds to others.
Neverbend tells us that Britannula has made great strides. It has good laws, a keen sense of its own dignity and a growing wish to stand on its own feet. In his eyes the island is a place where reason can be tried out without the old habits of Europe getting in the way.
This setting matters because the novel is a thought experiment. Trollope takes a small, young society and lets one idea grow in it. Neverbend is the idea's champion, and the island is the laboratory. As you read, you are asked to watch how far a sensible-sounding plan can travel before it meets real people.
The tone is light from the start. Trollope does not preach. He lets his narrator speak, and he lets us notice what Neverbend does not.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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