Joanna Trollope would like to bring the following to your attention. Despite her foray into the adrift Bridget Jones generation in her last novel, Girl from the South, she does not write chick lit; and counter to deeply held beliefs in the British media, she does not write what it is patronisingly known as Aga Sagas.
“The tabloids love anything that rhymes,” she says, talking to me on the telephone from her home in London: she’s polite enough to acknowledge the insane scheduling of our phone date – “is it the middle of the night for you?” – but confident enough in her celebrity to breeze ahead without apology. “There’ve only been Agas in about three of the novels! And I’m accused of always setting books in villages, or in churches, but there’ve only been vicar’s wives in two or three. I’m tiredly resigned to the fact that I’ll totter to the grave with this [label].”
Trollope doesn’t appear to be tottering anywhere yet, except up multiple bestseller lists. Her latest novel, Brother and Sister*, is her 12th contemporary novel in 16 years, following an equally prolific “apprenticeship” in historical fiction. Three of her novels – The Choir, The Rector’s Wife and Other People’s Children – have been turned into television series. And however much she loathes the Aga Saga tag (“It doesn’t just patronise me – it patronises the readership”), the spawning of a genre she admits she’ll “be ‘queen of’ forever” is no small achievement.
Nor are her sales figures: since the soapy adaptation of The Rector’s Wife was first broadcast in 1993, she has been a no-miss bestseller. Some authors play dumb and self-deprecating about sales, but Trollope likes to pay tribute to the “loyal and robust” readership who keep her in tea and biscuits. Ever the professional, she even gives a shout-out to New Zealand readers, on whom she’s “very keen” because “they all turned up last year when I went out for Girl from the South. People had driven miles across the Canterbury Plains.”
Hard-driving Cantabrians are not her only foreign fans: Trollope is about to embark on a major reading tour of the US, one of her numerous growing markets. She seems – and sounds – terribly English in a jolly hockey sticks sort of way, a bit like an elegant, less hedonistic older sister to Joanna Lumley. But although she says that “one is always diffident about seeming boastful”, Trollope is not too shy to mention her own sales figures. Brother and Sister, she points out, has already sold 150,000 hard-cover copies in the UK.
Like many of Trollope’s novels, the new book has a plot sparked by her interest in a specific social issue. “It was slightly unfinished business from Girl from the South, where I looked at how identities are shaped by culture and family landscapes,” she says. “I thought: I haven’t really got to the heart of the matter – where we come from. And from there it was an extremely short step to adoption.”
The novel’s eponymous brother and sister are thirtysomethings David and Nathalie, whose abrupt decision to search for their respective birth mothers sends disturbing ripples through their families’ lives. Spouses sulk or stray; their adoptive mother feels rejected; their children get neglected. Nathalie has always declared “that not only did she not mind being adopted but that she actually preferred it, when all along she knew she was treading a separate, fragile, unhappy path”; her single-minded search ends up imperilling other relationships in her life. David, growing up “conscious of the gaps, the questions”, discovers that meeting his birth mother, Carole, only gives him answers he doesn’t like.
Adoption offered Trollope the fraught emotional scenario necessary for one of her contemporary morality tales and that other magical ingredient: topicality.
“It seemed to me a good moment to write a book,” she says frankly. “This is a unique moment in adoption. People in their thirties are looking for their mothers. These are the children of women put under terrific social pressure to give up children born out of wedlock. It’s hard for people now to understand the ferocity of that pressure. In a few years time, society will have become so much more liberal, we won’t have this level of adopted children. Although,” she adds, possibly with one eye on a future novel, “there’ll be cross-cultural adoption, which will bring its own problems.”
Trollope is swotty when it comes to research – she worked in a supermarket (“for about three days: you get the hang of it extremely quickly”) to research The Rector’s Wife – and takes a briskly professional approach to each new book. “I start with the emotional situation, and then I map out a dramatic personae,” she explains. “Then I work out an imaginary geography rooted in a real area of England. And then I start the research, because I know the age and type of people I’m going to write about. Three quarters of the way through my research, I’ll structure the book.” She’ll block out the first five chapters, and decide on an ending. “I know where I’m going,” she says, “but I don’t know how I’m going to get there.”
Situations and types, however, don’t make for a page-turning read, and Trollope is sometimes criticised for her topic-takes-all approach. At times in Brother and Sister, the glorious cause threatens to overwhelm the cast, dividing the characters into two opposing teams – scarred-by-adoption and scarred-by-proxy. But the author insists she’s passionate about telling a story (“Once the situation is firmly in my head, I make sure it doesn’t take over the narrative”) and resists what she describes as “cosy, predictable fiction with happy endings”.
Certainly, she has a gift for creating nuanced characters of all ages – if not of all races – and her best books, like Marrying the Mistress and Other People’s Children, are wry, well-observed evocations of the messiness and hypocrisy of middle-class life. Unlike some popular writers, Trollope doesn’t patronise her characters or lean too hard on plot, and she’s not afraid of digging into dark
corners, revealing all the unpleasant, unspoken resentments lurking in the homes of the unsalted-butter-and-
sauvignon-blanc set.
After all, why confine yourself to Aga-owners when so many more people have a chopping board, a corkscrew and a lavender-scented laundry basket full of emotional problems? Whether the setting is rural or urban, this is true Trollope country: the supper table, the school run, the “grisly party, full of the exaggerated, strained jollity of middle-aged people pretending that they weren’t middle-aged”.
She believes that the “human condition is fascinating and complicated”, but Trollope’s large-scale success depends on devising emotional twists in situations that resonate because they’re familiar. Even when she ventures offshore – to the American South, for example, in her last novel – her readers still feel at home.
Familiarity, however, breeds a certain amount of critical contempt. “My sales figures are a problem for a lot of reviewers,” comments Trollope archly. So is her readership: however many letters Trollope claims to get from male readers, this is women’s fiction, subject to the same sneers as women’s television and magazines. And Trollope’s focus is relentlessly domestic; even when a book is set in London, the door is closed on all the urban grit because she’s most intrigued with what goes on in private. As a writer who has claimed to enjoy defending unpopular social categories – like the “other woman” and the stepmother – she knows that the most intense battles take place over dinner or during strained telephone conversations, or at times simply within someone’s unhappy head.
Critics who enjoy chastising Jane Austen for Not Mentioning the War turn their attention to Trollope every year or two and dismiss her as middle-aged, middle England and middle-brow. She used to worry, she says, that reviewers were contriving an “unbelievably false image” of her work as too tidy and twee. Unsurprisingly, she resented being cast as fiction’s prim maiden aunt – not as brainy as A S Byatt, racy as Jilly Cooper or hip as any number of ageing lads. Because, rather than radiating a reassuring quality, Trollope’s novels revel in conflict and uncomfortable situations. They subvert our expectations, sparkle with detail and dialogue, and reveal the shifting dynamics of contemporary families. Also, her characters behave rather badly, and that’s why they’re such a pleasure to read about. If there’s nothing more frustrating than other people’s children, there’s nothing more compelling than other people’s problems.
Brother and Sister won’t disappoint the most ardent Trollopians, but the more picky among us will find it rather second-tier. Many of the book’s British reviews characterised Brother and Sister as a series of earnest case studies bogged down in therapy-speak and heavy-handed psychological commentary. The criticism isn’t entirely unjustified.
Trollope’s child characters are usually pitch-perfect, but poor 12-year-old Ellen sags under the weight of too many plot-heavy lines. “I’m fed up … with Mum [being] so out of it because of you,” she shouts at David, “that she goes from being so much of a mother we can’t breathe to absolutely no mother at all!”
David’s wife, Marnie, is even worse. “You’ll find experience dictates your knowledge,” she tells Ellen. “And validates it.” True, Marnie is both smug and Canadian – but this doesn’t mean she has to talk like Dr Phil.
Trollope suspects that some of this criticism may be informed by the very British suspicion of what one character calls “all this soul-baring”, but Trollope insists that “even the English talk about being in denial or seeking closure now”. And anyway, grumpy reviews are a
permanent dark cloud hovering over her literary landscape. “My mother said to me: there’s possibly nothing left to say about your books! A lot of reviewers have run out of steam. The snippier comments were invariably female and middle-aged. They’re seeking originality in their reviews.”
Do reviews matter? “The sales have taken no notice of the reviews,” says Trollope. But does she take notice? “If I get a critical review from somebody I admire, like Fay Weldon, I’ll take it very seriously. If it’s a kind of staff reviewer who is longing to write a novel themselves, it’s rather a different category. I’ve learnt to distinguish between what is valid, constructive criticism that I can use to improve the next book, and what is to do with a reviewer’s personal baggage. I read them much more cursorily now. The dear readers have made sure I don’t need to.”
Like many British celebrities who are famous for having done something other than appear on Big Brother, Trollope dances a reluctant tango with national newspapers. “I’m well aware of what I owe the press,” she says, “in terms of visibility and spreading the word.” But she’s had enough “absolutely hideous run-ins” with the muck-raking tabloids to persuade new publisher Bloomsbury to assign a “media adviser” to help manage the demand for dirty laundry.
“There’s an element of sourness and unmerited viciousness in the British press. Everyone who’s fond of you gets sucked into that sink. The tabloid press has no compunction about door-stepping your 85-year-old mother and asking impertinent questions.”
Snippy reviews, impertinent questions: nothing will keep Trollope from her dear readers. Although she diplomatically describes herself as “not quite as compelled” as famous relation Anthony, fabled for writing thousands of words every day before breakfast and dashing off to invent the postal system, Trollope admits that if “I’m not writing, I’m agitating slightly. I’m happier if I have a book on the go.”
So, of course, she has another book on the go already. Trollope started writing late, and now that she’s a single woman of independent means, she’s not one for wasting time. She’s had two marriages, two children and two stepchildren; now she has two homes, London and Gloucestershire, “where my dog is”. She writes at both places, working “at a desk or the kitchen table or a coffee table; I could write in the departure lounge if pushed”. And for those of you who need to know such things, she writes in the morning (“It’s quite odd – writing a steamy sex scene over elevenses!”) and in longhand, because she prefers “the silence and the simplicity of it”.
But enough intimate revelations: Trollope won’t give much away about the next book. “It’s like the ultrasound pictures of fetuses, I think,” she says. “I’m in two minds about them. Perhaps we shouldn’t look so earnestly at something that’s not ready to be seen.”
Having dissected the middle-class family so thoroughly – through marriages, divorces, remarriages, mistresses, adoptions, lesbianism, American holidays, Spanish lovers, etc – does she ever worry about running out of material?
“Never,” she says. “Just think of how humans conduct themselves. Nothing surprises you, but things still shock you.”
I can’t wait for the next book.
*BROTHER AND SISTER, by Joanna Trollope (Bloomsbury, $35).