Joanna Trollope: Girl from the South

By NORMAN BILBROUGH

It's reassuring to step into a Joanna Trollope novel: one is guided almost fluently into stories of angst and mild English adventure, and most of all relationships. And Girl from the South is really a thicket of relationships, right from the first chapter.

Gillon is an art restorer from Charleston, South Carolina, and she is sans relationship. She's odd, she's an isolate, and in the eyes of her deeply insistent and apparently loving family, a failure. They're determined to help her shed her relationship lack; a lack she wears like a cloak. And just as determinedly Gillon resists them.

Even though a couple of characters make lunges towards the territory, this novel is not about promiscuity. It's about the enormous love needs of a raft of characters who are either tied up with family, or no family.

Gillon escapes Charleston and her family by getting a restoring job in London. There she meets Tilly. They like each other enormously. Tilly, a magazine editor, lives with Henry. She needs Henry to ask her to marry him and start a family. Henry, a wildlife photographer, needs a family but he doesn't know it. Sure, he loves Tilly, but he also wants excitement. On the other hand his best mate William will marry Tilly like a shot even though he's in a relationship with Susie - a messy young woman in frivolous sandals.

Of course Gillon meets Henry and suggests he go to South Carolina where there are lots of birds and - unbeknownst to him - her family who are ready to love him to bits. Off he goes, and finds the change he's always craved. Gillon also finds change, reluctantly, and Tilly is catapulted back to her once emotionally distant Mum.

All this is great food for the relationship-mad reader. Trollope's characters are verbal and passionate (in their restrained way); they're so hungry for love and intimacy, and so damn scared of it too. Tilly's need for the manifestations of love and marriage is so strong it's almost palpable.

I'm sure Trollope would throw up her hands at the suggestion she write great literature. I'm pleased she doesn't try. Although she's got a complex cast of characters she doesn't fuss around with mood or introspection or texture.

She doesn't deal in arty appendages. She understands narrative and character contrasts and writes effortless prose.

She's a master of excellent populist fiction. Girl from the South is a sort of a cliff-hanger. By strenuously avoiding intimate connections, Gillon and Henry reveal themselves. They're frustrating, but endearing: I always wanted to know more about them. And the relationship thicket grows right up to the last page. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Bloomsbury

$34.99