Summary: A deep psychological study of control, power, and Trans-Per.

Pages: 700+

Rating: 8/10

Here I am again, surprising my ADHD self with yet another thick novel under the belt, and that too without a serious disruption of my daily schedule.

How is it possible? If someone had told me it was easily possible, due to how constancy (I will define this soon) works, I would have yawned and never believed them; this is like the feeling of becoming a parent. You have to become a parent to really know what it feels like being one.

Constancy, as I term it here in my review, is a word that does not exist in the English language (perhaps not in most languages, but in the ones that it may, I don’t know it.). By this, I am describing a situation whereby continuous, intermittent and persistent action, produces outcomes that are significant enough to warrant our surprise.

I’ll explain it in terms of reading. By continuous, I mean that I grabbed the novel whenever I had the chance to read. The continuity thus, is focused (I would not start another novel concurrently, as I used to do and as most ADHD folk are wont to do). By intermittent, I meant that if there were days or a day I didn’t get the chance to read, it didn’t matter. Finally, by persistent, I meant that I kept doing this, until I finished the novel.

Also, each reading was not roughly the same amount. I’d read as much as I felt like, in combination of my general available time. Speaking of time, I read novels in the toilet, since I think the greatest freedom is to have as much as you need to finish your toilet. :)

The first surprising discovery for me, was how constancy can make a seemingly difficult task almost too easy. ADHD folk have difficulty concentrating, and most importantly, difficulty finishing a task. The ADHD culminates in execituve failure. This much is known in the literature. But what has not been discussed, nor widely-known, is that the ADHD can find his own hyperfocus, and once he does, difficulties dissipate.

I’ll come to novel soon, but let’s get this out of the way. The typical hyperfocus of an ADHD is well-known: as soon as something deeply interests us, we can invest in it fully, and get it done at superhuman speeds. That was the case with a book I found in 2025, which for various reasons I can’t publicly mention (but it was about world war II). The book horrified me, and I finished it in less than a day, all 400+ pages of it, and that too, on a screen!

So when I say surprise, I mean at the discovery of a different kind of a long hyperfocus. I’ve thus discovered, at least for ADHD folk, that if you do anything under constancy, the effect is similar to the typical acute hyperfocus, only the time-line is stretched. The difficulty to you, as the person, has diminished the same way as in the acute hyperfocus. This also reminds me of what my late Grandpa had said to me when I was three and we were climbing mountains together: “climb a mountain slowly”.

And a more relevant benefit to the reader: you don’t have to be ADHD to benefit from it. In fact, normies can benefit even more from it, given how your dopamine levels are normal. (The ADHD person has naturally low levels of dopamine.)

And now the novel.

After reading several Trollope novels in succession, I’ve come to discover a pattern that pervades his works. In each novel, Trollope scatters a leitmotif that he revisits under different contexts, the contexts being the social pressures acting on personal struggles of different archetypes of people.

Like Gogol, Trollope archetypes every major personality he introduces. He doesn’t introduce them for the sake of peopling his novel, that is. The archetypes also recur in several novels. In He knew he was right, we are introduced to the archetype of a rigid, feelingless, cold, and man-unloving (that is incapable of loving a man) wench named Wallachia Petri, whom, Trollope even viciously attacks and calls a “rabid enthusiast”. In The Eustace diamonds, similarly, Lucinda Roanoke is presented as such, and he goes to great lengths to mock her. In Framley Parsonage, the archetype reappears as Miss Grantly (we will not quote directly, so as to not spoil it for readers).

But though the archetypes reappear (as they do for both men and women), the leitmotiffs are unique to each novel. In TFP, Trollope’s main idea under consideration is human communication. But if you are yawning when I said the C word, let it be known that Trollope was no armchair writer, and he had enough experience of the world to know exactly how people used communication as a power, in some cases as a means to control others.

This wouldn’t have occurred to me had I not accidentally found a very great book on Trans-Per view of communication, that is, (“Trans-Per” is a portmanteau of transactional + perceptual) communication is never a one-way transmission of a message from sender to receiver (the older linear/Shannon-Weaver view), but a simultaneous and very much reciprocal process in which each participant is encoding and decoding based on their own perceptions, and meaning is co-created rather than simply passed along. (Kenneth K. Sereno & Edward M. Bodaken, Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

Since this review is quite long, I will refrain from mentioning examples, but I encourage the good reader to read the Sereno-Bodaken book before attempting TFR. That way, all the events in the book will make more sense, as if one is wearing a very special glasses that sheds light on how words and actions are actually used to control and defend against control. Especially the about-face Lady Lufton makes in regard to Lucy Robarts. That episode alone is worth all the time and effort you will be investing in this great book.