A modern predicament

Joanna Trollope uses believable characters to deal with social problems. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Over the years - and rather unkindly, in my opinion - Joanna Trollope's books have tended to be relegated to the category of "Aga saga". In other words, unchallenging novels set around the massive heat storage Aga stoves that middle-class Englishwomen love to gather around on chilly mornings, cook on and use to warm their drafty mansions.

But Trollope is much better than that. Her genius is to take a social problem and discuss it through the everyday lives of everyday people. It's not her style to editorialise, nor to preach, she just lets thoroughly believable characters play out the dramas, page by page.

This latest novel is particularly relevant. It deals with death, divorce, life with adult children and much more.

The core of the story is the sudden death of Chrissie's husband, Richie. Except that he's not her husband but her partner of 23 years and the father of her three daughters. For most of those years she's worn a gold ring on the third finger of her left hand and pretended. Now she has to face the fact that not only is she an unmarried mother, there is also another wife (and genuine widow) and grown-up son to deal with. Why? Because although her "husband's" relatively new will leaves Chrissie and his daughters most of his meagre fortune including the house, his treasured piano and his early music scores are bequeathed to a first family he rarely mentioned.

What Chrissie finds so hard is the fact that, during all the years he shared a life with her, Richie never asked her to marry him nor divorced his first wife. And, as his will spells out so clearly, he still had feelings of loyalty towards his first wife and their son.

Trollope describes both families with equal understanding. Her description of the way Chrissie's once-ordered house falls into confusion after the funeral is so understated it's brilliant. The broken-off and often disjointed conversations between the mother and her daughters have the ring of reality.

But it is the first wife and her son, introduced into the story in chapter two, who are dealt with most sensitively. Trollope paints the picture of a woman building on her self-confidence and Northern English backbone on the back of a piano, some old sheet music - and being remembered. Meanwhile the shortcomings, weaknesses and magnetic personality of Richie, the dead and buried piano player, are dissected and laid out for all to see as skilfully as any pathologist might.

Instructive, mannered and beautifully written, this is a book that focuses on a modern predicament with an eagle's eye. Grief, love, jealousy, half-buried loyalty, and plain old cowardice are examined from all angles with the writing talent of a modern Jane Austen.

The Other Family
by Joanna Trollope
(Random House $38.99)