Girl from the South
Joanna Trollope Bloomsbury, 311pp, £16.99
ISBN 0747557993
I was always a huge fan of Joanna Trollope's Aga sagas, especially on telly. For my money, Lindsay Duncan's performance as the angst-ridden, adulterous rector's wife was the highlight of her acting career (which cannot be said for her inexplicably well-received Private Lives with Alan Rickman). I felt Trollope was being gloriously subversive with the flawed-middle-class-perfection storyline, intrinsically tongue-in-cheek with the multiplicity of cheekbones, cabbage roses and other Cotswold cliches. The slightly balding but dashing boyfriend was perfect, and the bits where posh Lindsay took a job in a supermarket were sublime social comedy. I can recall it all instantly, although it is ten years since it was screened.
Following a painful divorce and what looks like a make-over, Trollope turned her back on Aga sagas. Given the growth of Grey Power, she could, one imagines, profitably have turned her hand to Saga sagas - or followed on in the same vein as last year's smash hit, Marrying the Mistress. Instead, she's gone all young and impecunious on us. There's not a betrayed-but-comfortably-off country wife to be seen in Girl from the South, still less a barrister with a mid-life crisis. Troublesome public-school-educated teens? Forget it. Not even a farmhand with wandering hands. This book, on the contrary, is the nearest Trollope has yet got to chick lit, the living-in-a-bedsit-in-London-waiting-for-Mr-Right school of novels.
Basically, it's a lager saga. Henry and William, the two main characters, spend lots of time in bars drinking and discussing the other major players: troubled Henry's too-perfect editor girlfriend Tilly, who wants to marry him, and feckless William's slapdash sidekick Susie, who wants to do whatever she feels like at the time. And also the mysterious, red-headed Gillon, flatmate of Henry and Tilly, and the title's "girl from the South", an American art historian come to London to escape the expectations of her family.
Single and unsettled, Gillon has always felt like a black sheep compared to the rest of her professionally and socially eminent clan in Charleston, South Carolina. Her average looks may pale in comparison to those of her blonde, skinny sister, yet they prove enough to entice Henry to visit her in the States. Once there, Henry is sufficiently seduced by the beauty of Charleston and Gillon's colourful, welcoming kinsfolk to pursue his ambition to be a wildlife photographer. This break with Britain is the book's dramatic high point - agony and betrayal for Tilly, guilt for Gillon, and opportunity for William, who has been after Tilly for years.
At the heart of Trollope's tightly written, acutely observed novel is what it means to be a family. Despite typifying different varieties of single Londoner, William, Henry, Tilly and Susie are a clan. They alternately irritate, love and look out for each other, in just the same way as Gillon's establishment family in Carolina. And that family, it turns out, is not as close-knit as it seems.
What is interesting is that, despite the novel's much-hyped cast of younger characters, and the change of setting from south-west England to Deep South America, the essential Trollope remains. The angsts of the educated middle class prevail; through Henry and William in particular, Trollope explores the effect of the burden of choice on the contemporary have-it-all generation, and the wearying, endless pressure of having to achieve perfection in every possible personal and professional sphere. You can take the girl out of Gloucestershire . . .
Wendy Holden's new novel, Fame Fatale (Headline, £10), is a current bestseller
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