PERHAPS the most compelling character in Joanna Trollope’s new novel is the one you never meet.
The Other Family opens with the premature death of Richie Rossiter, a successful pianist and songwriter, whose picture-perfect family life in the trendy London village of Hampstead is soon revealed to be a lot more complicated than his family had believed.
Richie’s death from a heart attack sparks the expected agony and grief for his beautiful younger wife, Chrissie, and his three glamorous daughters, Tamsin, Dilly and Amy. But that is just the beginning of their confusion and pain. For it is soon revealed that Richie and Chrissie were never married, meaning expensive tax consquences for her inheritance. To make matters worse, it emerges that Richie never divorced his first wife, Margaret, his childhood sweetheart who had first guided him onto the rungs of fame and fortune on the northern club circuit, and who, since her desertion by Richie for the younger Chrissie, has been making a tidy living on Tyneside as a music agent. Margaret’s son Scott, who last saw his father at age 14, makes an unhappy living as a lawyer and has, perhaps not surprisingly, serious commitment issues. Scott lives in an apartment which may have a grand view of the Tyne but is as spartan and empty as it’s occupant’s capacity to love. When Richie’s will reveals that he has left the bulk of his valuable songwriting royalties to Scott and his beloved Steinway to Margaret, things reallly get complicated.
For while the death and bequest liberate Margaret into finally removing her wedding ring – 22 years after Richie had left her, and allow Scott to finally explore his love of music again, it causes nothing but havoc for the family down South.
Chrissie and her daughters must face up to the fact that without either Richie’s earnings or his royalties, they must sell their beloved Hamstead home. The three daughters handle all these changes in their lives differently, with Tamsin and Dilly revealing various degrees of fury and jealousy, while Amy is more interested in reaching out to the brother she’s never met and finding out more about her father’s early life in Newcastle.
At less than 350 pages, The Other Family would make a great weekend read, in which as one English critic adroitly put it: “Old resentments, feelings of abandonment and loss and old love have to jostle with the noisy banalties of money and property.”
Trollope is known in Britain – not usually affectionately – as the ‘Queen of the Aga Saga’, but this latest novel reveals an elegant, understated prose style and a comfortable understanding of the loyalties, disloyalties, dreams and petty jealousies of the modern British family. One of the recurring themes is of the very strong sense of place among both families – Chrissie and her brood are classic Ham and High readers – affluent, artistic, well groomed and confident. Margaret and Scott, by comparison are more tribal and northern – fiercely proud of their Tyneside roots, hard-working and flinty, not given to outbursts of emotion or passing fancies. And one of the book’s joys is seeing Chrissie’s youngest daughter, Amy, wide-eyed and breathless at the architecture of modern Tyneside as she makes her first foray north of the Watford gap.
The Other Family is a small pleasure, but an elegant and engrossing one nonetheless, as we see both families grope their way out of grief and forward into acceptance and understanding.
The Other Family, Touchstone/Simon & Shuster. April 2010. Trade Paperback, 336 pages ISBN-10: 1439129835
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