BOOKS

Down on the farm

David Sexton

NEXT OF KIN

At his wife's funeral, Robin Meredith was asked by a woman in a paisley headscarf, whom he didn't immediately recognise, if he wasn't thankful to know that Caro was now safe with Jesus.

Nobody who has read Joanna Trollope would have any difficulty in guessing the author of the opening sentence of Next of Kin, so effectively has she created her own fictional world. It's all there immediately, rather like the old joke about the one-line story which contains all the essential themes (`Fuck me, said the Bishop. . . ') Already there is love and loss: Trollope always writes about either death or the pre- view of death that is separation and divorce. There is religion, or rather its pharisaical impersonation. There is that brisk placing via props and accessories. There is, too, a rapid intimation of the social pressure to conform from those around us, which fails to recognise our inward hurts or to answer our real needs. Plain though it seems, it is a skilful sen- tence, which almost instantly creates a reaction of sympathy and frustration.

Joanna Trollope can perhaps best be seen as the English riposte to Anne Tyler. Tyler explores the American dream of always being able to move on, to leave the mistakes and impedimenta of the past behind and start again at any time. Trol- lope, on the other hand, works with the English habit of taking what you're given, settling for what you've got, narrowing life down, never opening it out.

Trollope and Tyler, though, have in com- mon the true novelist's gift of being able to involve the reader's fantasy. Reading them both, you catch yourself wanting things to be otherwise, for reconciliations to become possible, for deaths not to have been deaths. Technically, Trollope is far more adept than such rivals in the bestseller lists as JiIly Cooper and Jeffrey Archer.

The Aga, though, has obviously begun to rankle. Trollope takes a cross little sideswipe here at her rivals, ridiculing

a pretty-looking novel, with a white shiny cover showing a bright water-colour of an idealised country kitchen with the door open to a garden beyond and spires of delphiniums and a beehive,

picked up by one of her characters.

The country world of the book bore no resemblance to anything Lyndsay had ever encountered in country life .. .

In Next of Kin there are no Agas. The baking gets done in anonymous `cookers'. Agas have to be inferred. There Is, however, a significant fridge — a Westinghouse, 'this huge, double-doored American thing, big as a wardrobe'.

Two generations of Merediths farm near the River Dean. One son, Joe, works with his parents, Harry and Dilys, on the farm where he grew up. The other, Robin, has set himself up as a dairy farmer near by. In this world, people are

the farming children of farming parents; for most of them the decision to devote them- selves to the land had scarcely been a deci- sion at all but rather an acceptance of the preordained path of things.

Trollope is determined to de-romanticise farming, stressing the Merediths' debts, their harassment by bureaucracies and their ceaseless labour. Cold Comfort Farm is never far away. Robin gives a big speech on the subject:

You begin to think whatever you do is likely to go wrong, you decide to spray or not to spray and then the weather turns and all your time and money is wasted. You feel fate's against you. You feel the land is fate.

Nonetheless, the response of most readers is going to be one the genre perpetually invites: that I should have such problems!

Into this settled English world has come an American disturbance. Caro, the wife who has died of a brain tumour before the novel begins, could almost be an Anne Happy retirement, Dave . . . here's a clock' Tyler character who has been translated into the wrong fictional world. The daugh- ter of Californian vagabonds, she's a dreamer. Recuperating in England after a broken romance and an infection that has left her infertile, she becomes Robin's wife. They have an adopted daughter but she continues to brandish her expired return ticket at him. The imported fridge is an symbol.

Robin's brother Joe has also fallen in love with Caro.

Even later, after she and Robin were mar- ried, she had retained a special quality for Joe, a reminder that there were places where life was different to this, where possibility was in the air, like oxygen.

After Caro's death, the whole family begins to fall apart. Robin loses interest in life. Joe, despairing, commits suicide. Into this sorry mess steps an angel: Zoe. A stu- denty friend of the adopted daughter, she's an implausible marvel, a free spirit, always giving, never taking. She becomes Robin's lover from the bigness of her heart and makes a man of him again, while seeing off the small-minded gossips of the village.

It is Zoe's task also to give gnomic expression to Trollope's truths about life. Facing up to Joe's shotgun suicide, she says:

This is bad. . . This is so bad. . . Death is violent. . . There must be a moment of dying when it is for everyone, even for people who just die in their sleep. But this is the worst.

To Robin, she delivers this wise counsel:

You don't want to think about what people think. What they think is their problem. We aren't responsible for other people's hang- ups.

Soon the other characters start practising this curious blend of therapy-speak and Ecclesiastes too. 'There isn't permanence anywhere', concludes Robin sagely.

Trollope, being able to dramatise well enough, doesn't need to permit herself so many of these little sermons and opinions. Still, they must be gratifying to deliver. Through Zoe, for example, Trollope lets fly a little tirade of rural revanchism. With her new experience of the farming life, Zoe scorns the people she is working with on an advertising shoot back in London:

I bet, Zoe thought, tilting the reflector so that a warm glow lit the girls' faces from underneath, I bet none of this lot have ever touched a cow. I bet they don't think about cows. I bet they just put milk in their coffee and never think about where it came from, about how cows live, who looks after them. I'd like a cow to walk in now. I'd like her to come straight in and just stand there and see what they'd do, see if the cow made them look stupid. The cow wouldn't look stupid, she'd just go on being a cow -

No doubt in the inevitable forthcoming television adaptation such a scene could be arranged. With the right cow, hardly any- thing more would be necessary really just that and the fridge.

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