Stephanie Merritt
MARRYING THE MISTRESS by Joanna Trollope (Bloomsbury)
What is the point of Joanna Trollope novels? The plot of her latest involves, as you might expect, extra-marital liaisons, fraught filial relationships and the minutiae of family life, renders them utterly banal and manages to stretch this banality to fill 311 pages.
Do people find these novels reassuring, you wonder? Do they take comfort from the thought that, however dull life may become, at least it could never be as boring as the lives of a Trollope family? Or is it – a darker notion – that people read these novels because they identify (for goodness sake) with the characters?
Normality – or what Middle England considers normality – is the hallmark of Trollope’s dramatis personae. Guy Stockdale, a normal judge in his early 60s with a normal wife, two sons, three grandchildren and a nice house and garden, has done something very abnormal. Not in having an affair with a younger woman – about the most normal thing a middle-aged man could do – but in finally having the balls to get up and leave his wife for her after 40 years of marriage. The novel is the story of how Guy’s family pick their way through the wreckage and how they go about accepting, or not, the mistress of the title as she becomes the new wife. Or does she?
Unfortunately it is difficult to care very much about any of these characters; with the exception of Laura, the abandoned wife, their voices are interchangeable and their personalities slight. (It should be mentioned that Trollope has been a tiny bit daring in making one of Guy’s sons gay, and no one ever suggests that this is anything but normal. A nice, sympathetic gay character is of course de rigueur these days in novels of this sort, the “some of my best friends” mentality that enables Middle Englanders to feel smug about their high tolerance threshold while signing the local church petition to keep on the statue books laws such as the infamous anti-gay Section 28.)
Trollope has often been praised for her scalpel-like insight into the minds and emotions of normal, middle-class people. This psychology, it turns out, has the qualities of the potato peeler rather than the scalpel, being manifest in such anodyne reflections as the one that women tend to read the arts and review sections in Sunday newspapers while men read news and sport. “Women only wanted news if it concerned the humanity of human beings …” As opposed to the humanity of what, precisely?
Marrying the Mistress belongs to that genre of popular middlebrow writing called, offensively, “women’s fiction”, as if anything more taxing were unlikely to be read by women. The paradox is that it is women who lap up this stuff in their thousands, and this collection of platitudes entirely lacking in drama or imagination has already joined its predecessors in the bestseller lists and will no doubt in time become a successful television drama.
But good writing ought to make you think – about yourself, about language, about the humanity of human beings. This book makes you think only: what is the point of Joanna Trollope novels?