A Village Affair by Joanna Trollope

I found this book when I was trawling through lists of “lesbian novels” and wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before. Then I looked at the date – it was published in 1989 – and realised that it came out at a time when I was thoroughly absorbed in raising three children. I have a very wide cultural gap in my education stretching over about twelve years – I know virtually nothing about the music, art, literature, film or theatre of the eighties. I was otherwise very happily occupied.

So, it’s a big treat for me now to discover gems from that time. And this really is one.

A Village Affair is Joanna Trollope’s second novel, which makes it interesting because it was published well before she had the big reputation as the creator of the “Aga Saga” genre of British women’s writing. To date she has published fourteen novels under her own name, and a further nine, mostly historical novels, under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.

Alice Jordan, the main character, has almost stumbled into a marriage with the rich but boring Martin. Alice is a painter, but her ability to paint is overwhelmed by her efforts to escape her own narrow-minded parents, caring for her children and trying to live up to the expectations of her glamorous and wildly successful new mother-in-law. When the family move to a small idyllic village, Alice desperately tries to fit in, but instead is bowled over by Clodagh, the wayward daughter of the local gentry.

The writing is exquisitely paced, in a tone ranging from gentle mockery to outright condemnation of all the terribly silly social conventions of English middle class village life. The writing itself, the tone and the vocabulary, is also peculiarly, inexplicably, English. Some of it is so funny that it lead me to laugh aloud.

Take this, for example, from chapter four; “Alice had asked Mr Finch, in his shop the previous week, for an avocado pear, and Mr Finch had made it elaborately plain to her that left to himself his shop would be a profusion of avocado pears, but that the brutish character of his non-poetry reading clientele demanded nothing more outrē than cabbages.”

The brilliance of Joanna Trollope is that she writes from both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. While understanding the complexities of English manners, and appearing sympathetic to their intent, she stands back and allows the reader space to experience the claustrophobic impacts.

She describes the relationship between the two women well. Alice, trying to find herself, trying to surface, takes a chance on the unknown. Clodagh, knowing that her emotional life is bound to other women forever, explores the possibility of a domesticity in all its bucolic guises - love and family, children, pets, gardening, cooking and cleaning. Joanna Trollope handles the outcome for both women with great sensitivity.

A beautiful novel to read. In the Bloomsbury Classics small format edition, a beautiful book to handle. I hope there are more treats from the eighties I’ve yet to discover.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

My friend Elizabeth gave me this book for Christmas, which was brave of her because most people don’t, knowing how many books I buy for myself. I’m so pleased Lizzie took the chance, even though she was concerned that it was “too hetero” for me. But I loved this book in so many ways.

Annie Dillard is often referred to as a writer’s writer. When I did my Masters in Writing at UTS, her book, The Writer’s Life, was almost a set text. But, interestingly, the thing I most remember about that book was that she asks over and over “Why are we reading?”

Ostensibly this is the tale of a long and not always conventional marriage. There are important friends, children and lives lived not in the pursuit of the material, but with an awareness of the mind, emotion, even spirituality. It is inspiring in its understated themes of loyalty, the importance of friendship and the rejection of bitterness and revenge in the fulfilled life.

When I read the first couple of pages, I felt the task was going to be too much. To understand, to really follow her, I would have to concentrate on every single word, to check back and forth to grasp the thread, to ponder. But four or five pages in, I realised that it was okay to wander along, to put my confusions or puzzlement aside, and get to the meaning, or at least what I was going to make of it, by letting it wash over me line by line. Like poetry?

I might even suggest that there are lines and sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs that do not bear absolute rational scrutiny. At times I didn’t know what she was talking about. But somehow that made it richer.

She tries very hard to stimulate the reader, to lead us down curious paths.

And the words themselves. About the same time I read this book I took up playing Scrabble, both online and at home with friends on a beautiful old board I bought on eBay. But even with the weirdest constellation of letters, I couldn’t make some of the words she uses. I needed to keep the dictionary close by, for words like “tatterdemalion” which means a person in tattered clothing, or “epistomeliac” (which incidentally isn’t in any of my dictionaries.)

Is it too clever? No, it’s thrilling. Should you read it? Yes. Would I play Scrabble with her? Never.