The Fixed Period

The Fixed Period is the title of the second audiobook to which I contributed in the LibriVox project.  It is a strange story, to say the least, written by the prolific Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, and first published in 1882.  Kirk and I, since we joined The Folio Society back in the 90's, have collected all of Trollope's 48 novels and have read most of them through the years.  The Fixed Period, however, was one that I tried in vain several times to read but could not get past the first few chapters.  It was very different from the usual themes of Trollope's stories about love, marriage, inheritance, lawsuits, impetuous and stubborn men and women, greed and ambition in some of his more unsavory characters, etc.  It has been called a dystopian fiction, set in 1980, long since passed without any such event, fortunately, ever having happened.  The story itself, though grim enough, was narrated in a matter of fact tone, mundane and argumentative, though what sends a chill down one's spine is not so much the dystopian society it depicts, but the realization how one can be led astray on a grand scale by mistaken beliefs and an inflexible will.

When I saw the book in the Readers Wanted list of LibriVox's catalog, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to find out, finally, what the story was about and how it ended.  I actually started reading, my first attempt at voice recording, from the last two chapters of the book.  After satisfying myself that nothing more disastrous happened than the frustration of a misguided idealist, I gradually read my way back up, and eventually recorded six chapters of the book in total.  I'm afraid my reading is rather mechanical, not like story-telling; I've a lot to work on still.