By Edward H. Garcia
For the past few weeks I have been reading Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers on my iPod Touch. An iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone without the phone. The one I have, last year’s model, also lacks a camera, but otherwise it shares most of the apps with the iPhone, including one for the Kindle. If you’re too cheap, as I am, to buy a Kindle, you can still download books to your iTouch. Naturally, I chose one of the many classic books that are free. I had just started rereading some of the Palliser novels by Trollope, so I searched the Kindle library to see what was available for free by Trollope. I found Barchester Towers and downloaded it—a matter of a few minutes. I could have downloaded all six Barchester novels for 89 cents, but passed on them.
In my iTouch version of Trollope there are no page numbers, no indication of where in the book I am, other than the occasional chapter number. Since I don’t know how many chapters there are in Barchester Towers, I began reading the way an ancient traveler might have set out on a voyage into a seemingly endless sea. Reading an actual book I am aware of how far into the story I have traveled and how far before the end. But on my iTouch I am just there, experiencing the story perhaps as Trollope experienced writing it—we both know there will be an ending, both have some sense of what has to be experienced or resolved before it can end, but both are in the present of the story. For a reader the present is a delicious moment, full of all the possibilities the trajectory of the story will allow.
The now-ness of reading Trollope on my iTouch has a lot to do with the size of the screen. It measures two by three inches, and one screenful is less than a hundred words, about one-fourth of what a page of my Oxford paperback of Phineas Redux holds. That book runs around 725 pages, not counting notes and appendices. So if Trollope is true to form, I might have 2900 screens in this reading experience—enough for me to be totally lost in the book. I have been reading for several days—the Archdeacon has come up against his nemesis Slope more than once, Mr. Arabin has, at 40, fallen in love for the first time, the Dean is not expected to live more than a few days, and I have no idea how far into the story, into the journey, I am.
There is a purity to the iTouch Trollope experience. There are no notes or annotations to explain the intricacies of religious professions in Trollope’s England. So I find myself sinking or swimming in a sea of curates, vicars, prebendaries, archdeacons, deans, chaplains and bishops (and their wives and widows), having to trust in the authenticity of Trollope’s account, much as I do in the fox-hunting sections of the Palliser novels or the details of sailing lore in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.
I imagine the earliest explorers crossing the ocean to come to a new world which, months into the voyage, could be one day’s sailing away or a hundred or more. Unlike them, I don’t have to worry about scurvy or dying of thirst, but I can share their sense of adventure and wonder, not knowing when it will end or precisely what the new world will look like.
I’m beginning to think I will spring for the 89 cents and download all the Barchester novels. When you go on a long journey, what could be better than to have as traveling companions a half dozen Trollopes?
