Books
She’s middle-aged, middle-brow and middle-class, but that’s enough compliments
by Paula Morris
English novelist Joanna Trollope’s contemporary morality tales sell by the truckload, for a good reason – they’re well-observed evocations of the messiness of middle-class lives and situations, including the “grisly party, full of the exaggerated, strained jollity of middle-aged people pretending that they weren’t middle-aged”.
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.”
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