Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
"The thing that I find spellbinding," Joanna Trollope declares, "is the contemplation of reality as it is attempted to be lived in the late twentieth century. It's back to the old Jane Austen line of fiction being a mirror held up to reality, and Sir Walter Scott saying that a novel is just a reflection of the everyday doings of ordinary people."
From her home in Gloucestershire, England, the popular novelist is discussing her fourth such reflection to be published in the United States, A Spanish Lover . "I wanted to hang it on the peg of twins, and the complexity of twins, and the way if you put a pair of twins together they make an incredibly whole person. But I wanted very much to write a love story and explore the idea of what happens when you try and make a myth into a reality. It was a real cliche, this one. Cold, inhibited, Protestant woman from the North unlocked by warm Catholic man from the South. And I thought, Let's see what happens if you put it to the test."
Her novels usually begin with an emotional situation that Trollope finds compelling. "For The Men and the Girls, it was the time bomb that ticks away at the heart of any relationship with a big age gap in it. For The Rector's Wife, it was the dilemma of finding yourself married to someone else's vocation."
Trollope was born during World War II. "We may have lived in a very cold house with not quite enough food, but books were everywhere." Later, she worked in the Foreign Office for two years, "trying to ferret out" the realities of Maoist China. Then she switched to teaching, which she thought more amenable to raising a family, and taught for 12 years. For the last 15 years she has been a full-time writer.
She doesn't write about her latest profession. "There are an enormous number of modern novels about writers, and of course there aren't that many writers compared to, say, office workers or teachers or hospital workers." In contrast Trollope researches other lives. "For The Rector's Wife, I went to work in a supermarket. For The Men and the Girls I went to work in a hostel for battered women. I did an enormous amount of research with the local cathedral for The Choir. Obviously there was a lot of travel in Spain for A Spanish Lover."
"You know," Trollope remarks, "a broken heart is a broken heart in Moscow, Tokyo, Vancouver. I want to tell a story that strikes a chord as widely as possible." Apparently she is succeeding. Her books have been translated into 20-odd languages. A U.S. woman who was raised a Southern Baptist wrote to her about one of the novels: "Except that the food is different, this is my childhood." Sometimes such realism strikes too close to home. A teenage girl told Trollope, "I read The Rector's Wife, but I didn't like it. It was too like real life for me."
With a nineteenth-century breadth addressing twentieth-century issues, Trollope's books feature characters from every age group. "I like writing about teenagers and children. It seems to be another trend of modern fiction, especially literary fiction, only to look at the generation of the heroes and heroines, as if the other generations were somehow irrelevant."
Most of Trollope's characters have not surrendered to the despair so common in contemporary fiction. "I love writing about that moment in people's lives -- and it happens to an enormous number of people -- where they turn protagonist. They realize that they don't have to just react; they can take the steering wheel for themselves."
Joanna Trollope distrusts tidy endings. She describes her books as "like joining a set of characters on a train journey. The readers and I get on at one station and travel with them for a bit of the journey, and then we get off again. And the characters go on."
Michael Sims's Darwin's Orchestra, an almanac of natural history, will be published in March.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.