Next Of Kin by Johanna Trollope

There are some writers who provide readers a kind of oasis of hope and solace even when writing about an unpredictable and in many ways menacing world. Johanna Trollope is one such writer, and her novel Next of Kin leaves the reader with a kind of guarded optimism in facing an uncertain future. At least on the surface, this is a story about how families adapt to grief and loss, and even if that were all there is to the novel, it would be well worth reading. Trollope creates characters who seem real, situations that seem in some way or other universal, and moral dilemmas that retain their complexity even as she points the way towards a resolution.

I don’t know about other readers, but I like reading authors who describe our current historical situation and who are willing to reveal the many casualties of contemporary life, in short, writers who choose to tell the truth rather than simply entertaining us or allowing us to escape real life. That said, I have to admit that many writers brave enough to describe the world as they see it also sometimes leave the reader with a sense of despair and hopelessness, since the authors are unable to mask their own cynicism as they describe the world around them. After reading a series of such books describing city life and some of the horrors it contains, I find myself yearning for something that is more positive, something that leaves room for hope and encourages actions that might create a future better than the past. So I turn to writers like Trollope as much for relief as for enlightenment, and she seldom disappoints me.

Next of Kin is about an extended family of British farmers, two brothers, one of whom continues with his parents to produce crops, and the other who chooses instead to begin a stock farm for both dairy and meat production. Both brothers find themselves competing with agribusiness and thus borrow over and over to purchase machinery and equipment that allows a kind of marginal competition in the new world they find themselves in, but in fact brings them ever closer to financial ruin and loss of their farms.

The novel really begins with the death of the wife of one of the brothers. Carolyn, or Caro as she is called, is an American who wanders to England in her early twenties in an existential search for some sort of meaningful life and a kind of permanence that she has never achieved with her own alternative culture parents and their nomadic existence. There she meets and marries her dairy farmer husband, Robyn; they adopt a daughter and then slowly but inexorably drift into separate lives lived under the same roof. The other brother, Joe, marries even later than Robyn, quickly has two children with his very non-farmer young wife, and builds what his parents and others see as a successful and thriving farm; his parents live their lives through him. He is their hero and their hope.

What neither Joe’s parents nor his wife understand is that he has been secretly borrowing for years, attempting to keep up with the demands of contemporary farming, and all the while barely keeping in check a dark, brooding anxiety and sense of hopelessness. For reasons never made clear the death of his sister-in-law Caro destroys a desperate hope he has been able to maintain, and shortly after her death, he shoots himself in a shed at his parent’s home.

Trollope’s deep understanding of human nature and of familial relations comes out in her descriptions of how the other characters in the novel react to Joe’s death. That the parents have lived for and through their son Joe is apparent in their devastation at his death. And his young wife, Lindsay, who has been trying for all of her years with Joe to reach him emotionally, eventually in desperation trying to warn her in-laws about his underlying psychological turmoil, is both devastated and bitter when her warnings go unheeded and her husband flees in the only way he can.

In this story of loss and change, there is one character who plays the role of catalyst for getting the family to move from petrified grief to a kind of healing and carrying on. She is an unlikely candidate for heroine—a punked up city-girl who knows nothing of farms or farm life and who does not even cook or clean for herself. Zoe, the city girl, enters the action via becoming the London roommate of Judy, the adopted daughter of Robyn and Caro, and inviting herself along on a visit to the country.

No doubt, some readers will see Zoe as bit too idealized, a too convenient free spirit brought in from the wings to get the family members to admit feelings and to begin to really talk to one another. But I found her to be almost believable, and a rather ingenious way for Trollope to bring in her own views on grief and change, on parenting, on what gets called conventional morality, even on the whole issue of biological, so-called  ‘real’, as opposed to adoptive (unreal?) parents.

I find the end of the novel to be optimistic and uplifting, although the best Robyn can do in order to actually stay on his farm and continue being a farmer requires him to sell his land and lease it back (just as his parents have always leased the land they farm). Each of the characters in the novel is brought to some sort of realization, one could even call it enlightenment. As Robyn tells his daughter Judy that she can come back from London, can stay on the farm if she chooses, though he must sell the land and hope to lease it back, she remarks, “Even though it’s so hard. Even though it’s always been so hard?”

Yes….I  wouldn’t want to live any other way now. I suppose I may have to, one day, but I’ll only give in at the last ditch.

While I must admit that as a reader I run to Trollope in order to relieve momentarily the gloom and doom of so much excellent contemporary fiction, I get more than the relief I had hoped for. I learn about people, about families, about relationships, and even when what I learn is sad and sobering, it is also tinged with hope.

In the end, even Dilys, the mother of Robyn and Joe, the person who is perhaps the most devastated by his suicide, the most hopeless, comes to some sort of resolution.

Change and loss, she said to herself, change and loss, like a chant, over and over, life carrying you away, carrying things away from you, then bringing them back, some little thing you didn’t look for, didn’t know you needed until you saw it washed up there, waiting at your feet. Change and loss. And growth. Growth where you had never looked for it before, never thought to look.

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Ghost Road, by Pat Barker

“Murder was only killing in the wrong place.” So reflects Rivers, the therapist who is a central character in all three of the novels in Pat Barker’s incredible World War I trilogy. Ghost Road is the third of the trilogy, and the one for which she received The Booker Prize, though Regeneration, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the prize and any one of the three would have deserved the prestigious award.

This is not a glorification of war book. Instead, it talks of the war and the battlefield in graphic and horrible detail that shows the bravery of the men who fought, but also the corruption of the British class system and the money interests of big business, especially as the war drags on long after if should have with men dying not to secure the victory, but to line the pockets of business men who are more interested in profits than the lives of soldiers.

Many of the characters in the novel, including the therapist Rivers, are drawn from actual historical figures. In fact, this novel actually moves back and forth between the battlefront, the hospital where Rivers treats both the physically and psychologically wounded, and cultures in the south seas where Rivers spent time as researcher and doctor before the war started. The so-called tribes he dealt with were descendants of head-hunting people and both the heads brought home from raids and the captives brought back from those same raids played pivotal roles in their cultural lives.

Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the people’s lives. Head-hunting was what they had lived for. Though it might seem callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most tremendous fun and without it life lost almost all zest.

It is no accident that Barker compares the head-hunters with atrocities of the war. While we may excuse the actions of the warriors in World War I while condemning as barbaric the head-hunters, Barker is less quick to judge.

As you might guess, this is not a happy book, but then none of Barker’s books is happy. Just as her earlier novels focused in on blue-collar workers and their struggles for a decent life given the brutality of market economies, so too in this one she focuses not on officers but on enlisted men who have everything to lose in fighting the war, and yet very little to gain by its so-called successful conclusion.

Besides the sadness of the events, the grimness of the novel is accentuated by Barker’s  simple and often harsh prose. Billy Prior, who is another genuine historical character who appears in all three of the novels, is unashamedly bisexual. Many of the sex scenes she describes are cold and repelling, and yet there is honesty in her prose that shines forth. Like the prostitutes who are the focus of her second novel, Blow Your House Down, there is nothing sentimental about Prior’s descriptions of his sexual relationships with either men or women; sex is simply a part of life, sometimes bartered, sometimes given as a gift, sometimes taken on the fly.

For this reader, both this novel and Regeneration were most interesting because of the accounts of the varied and horrific sorts of physic conditions suffered in the trench warfare of World War I, and the surprisingly compassionate care William Rivers gives to the men whom he encounters at Craiglockhart’s, the British hospital where the wounded are sent to be ‘fixed’ and sent back to the front. Of course, when Rivers succeeds, his charges are sent back to the French front, not because they are truly healed, but because they can, at least, talk again, or walk, or sleep without impossibly horrible dreams.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think—at least not beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

…the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now—any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think’s the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

Perhaps I have described this book too bleakly; there is warmth and even humor in it along with the chilling battle scenes. While I have to admit that I am ready to move onto something less intense, less troubling, this is a book all of us should read. Indeed, every book of Barker’s I have read has been well worth the time and effort. She is one of the finest writers alive.

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Love and Summer by William Trevor

I want to talk to you about an author who is new to me, though he may not be to you or to most avid readers. His name is William Trevor, and I want to talk about his 2009 novel Love and Summer. Trevor’s novel The Story of Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002; I intend to read that novel soon.

Everything about this little novel is understated. It is set in a small Irish town and the surrounding countryside, and is about as simple a story as one could imagine. It is as if the writer never raises his voice, never indulges in pathos, simply tells the story of a young orphan girl, Ellie, raised by nuns and, as was common practice, sent out as a servant to a small farm after a tragic accident left the owner of the farm both widowed and childless. Eventually, as the girl settles into the routines of the farm, Dillahan, the farmer whom she serves, asks her to marry him, and she does. “It was kindness—so it had seemed to her, and still did—when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no.”

Quite by accident, Ellie runs into a stranger to the small town, a photographer, Florian Kilderry, who is himself an orphan, though his artist parents died when he was already grown. For a married woman even to be seen in the presence of an unmarried man, and a stranger no less, is quite out of the ordinary. But Ellie cannot help the rush of infatuation she feels for this man so much closer to her age than the older farmer whom she has married. Florian is in the process of selling the house and land he has inherited from his parents (and cannot really afford to maintain), and intends then simply to leave Ireland and strike out on his own.

And thus begins a summer of love for the two young people, a love as simple and innocent as can be imagined. What Ellie does not know, cannot know, is that she is a kind of stand-in for a girl Florian knew in his youth, Isabella.

The reader is also introduced to other characters in the small town, one of who is the daughter of a relatively wealthy family, known in the town simply as Miss Connulty. Miss Connulty also fell in love as a young woman, but the relationship ended in a pregnancy and secret abortion, at which time her Catholic mother spiritually and emotionally ostracized her daughter and distanced herself from the husband who aided the girl in obtaining an abortion. It is no wonder that Miss Connulty takes great interest in Ellie and what she sees as the perilous circumstances she is falling into.

Williams is exceptionally gifted in his ability to draw believable characters with whom the reader identifies and to describe what are really tragic events in their lives but with calm and apparently emotionless prose. He also creates an aura of suspense, of foreboding, such that the reader is on tenterhooks, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. And still, despite the mystery and the tension, the writing is so low key, so quiet.

At first Ellie is shocked that she has allowed herself to be seen talking to this strange man, ashamed at what the nuns who raised her would think of such conduct. But soon, though she realizes that others might see her, might jump to conclusions, she puts such concerns aside.  “Anyone could have seen them and she hadn’t cared.” For a time, she decides that should she run into him again, she will simply cross the street to avoid him, will not allow such foolishness to cause distress to her husband or bring shame on her. But when their paths cross again and Florian suggests that she does not remember him, all thoughts of avoidance are instantly dashed.

She felt the colour mounting in her face, as it had before. Her thoughts became disordered, as they had become then too, perverse and separated from her, as if they were not hers. She wanted to say that of course she remembered him. She wanted to say that she wondered about him, that she had tried not to, that she had known she should not. She wanted to say she had known immediately who it was when he’d said hullo.

Compared to the flame of most modern day romance novels, this little book is so tame, its characters on the whole so decent and considerate of others. There are no real villains, no heroes either, simply people trying to make the best of their lives. And yet Trevor is incredibly astute and meticulous in describing the inner lives of his characters, and so aware of the enormous changes in Ellie’s emotional life after she meets Florian, changes in her attitudes towards the more or less arranged marriage she is in , and towards the future she can anticipate.

Of course, I will not give way the ending of the book, nor will I tell you much more of the story. In the end it is the emotional intelligence of the writer that is most important, the actual course of events much less so. Suffice it to say that it is a beautiful little story of loneliness and isolation, but also of hope and loyalty. My suspicion is that once you have read this book of Trevor’s, you will want to read lots more. I know that I do.