In picking up a novel by Joanna Trollope, readers know what to expect: a well-plotted story, centred on contemporary family relationships, probably told from the woman's point of view, with smart insights into human emotions and motivations, an acceptable writing style, and characters who are complex and sympathetic enough to care about. Once again, this best-selling author delivers.
But that's not all. Trollope's newest, The Soldier's Wife, has an extra aspect that adds immediacy and backbone. Unlike her best-known works, this book builds its plot around a newsworthy topic - the tensions that can unfold when a young British major returns home on leave after six months in Afghanistan.
Alexa and Dan Riley's marriage seemed like a fairy tale romance of two tall, good-looking main characters daring to break social boundaries. Dan is a third-generation military man, the first commissioned officer in his working-class family. Alexa is the only child of a retired low-level diplomat - his high point was "the very brief period, in Paris when he had stood in as a minister at the Embassy, during someone else's illness" - and his elegant and disappointed wife. When Alexa and Dan meet at a party, she is 26 years old and raising a toddler daughter on her own, after her first husband had died of a brain tumour.
Dan and Alexa marry, settle into army housing, and have twin girls who are three years old as the book begins. Some quandaries have inevitably piled up during Dan's deployment in Afghanistan - Isabel (Alexa's daughter from her first marriage, now approaching teenagerhood) is miserable at boarding school, and Alexa has been offered a tempting position as assistant head of languages at a local private school - but it's nothing they can't figure out together, like any happily married couple. If only they could talk to each other.
However, Dan isn't truly home, psychologically or emotionally. He is worrying about his troops' severe injuries plus some accusations of drug use while simultaneously angling for a promotion. Moreover, Gus, his best friend from the army, is in a state of collapse because his wife has abruptly left him. How can Dan possibly share with Alexa what he went through in combat? "All that was achieved in the long run by telling too much was to leave the person you loved - wife, girlfriend, family member with a series of ghastly images of, say, torn body parts scattered across the desert grit," he tells himself. "They could never, any of them, really get it."
Alexa, meanwhile, is growing increasingly constricted in the role of dutiful army wife. Night after night, Dan gets home too late to tuck in the twins or have dinner with her because he's out with Gus or taking care of lingering military duties. He also ignores their doting parents. Then Isabel runs away from school, and instead of moving closer to Alexa to cope with this crisis, Dan creates a new barrier by bringing Gus to live with them.
As the multiple storylines gallop forward, an astute reader could probably forecast the ending, but it's a page-turning ride to get there. Hovering at the edges is the intriguing figure of Jack Dearlove, who has been Alexa's confidante since childhood and who introduced her to her first husband. Since Trollope is obviously teasing the reader with the idea that this chubby businessman is the one Alexa was destined to marry, the real question is what the reader should do with that tease.
Trollope has been compared to Jane Austen, which of course isn't fair; no one else is or ever could be Austen. However, Trollope - who was awarded the OBE, or officer of the Order of the British Empire, one of the UK's highest honours, in 1996 - shares Austen's skill at creating original, realistic characters and her keen insight into what motivates these characters, whether it's Dan, Alexa, their parents, Isabel, or other military wives.
The novel is spot-on, for instance, in describing Isabel's careful parsing of the text messages from the boy she has a crush on and exactly when to reply xx to his xx. Just when the reader is as angry at Dan's lack of consideration as Alexa is, Trollope switches to Dan's point of view, and the reader feels Dan's gut-wrenching guilt and pain in a visit to his wounded men. Then back to the frustrated army wives, forced to put aside their own careers and move house whenever the military moves their husbands.
The public adores their soldier-husbands, Gus's estranged wife, Kate, declaims; "they're in a win-win situation just by being in uniform with a dirty, dangerous job to do. But what about us ... We're educated women with a contribution to make and the army just doesn't care how many of us it ... wastes."
The secondary players are particularly well drawn, including Alexa's parents and Dan's father and grandfather. Indeed, Dan's father, George, and grandfather, Eric - a pair of plainspoken old soldiers, stuck in their ways, gruff and sweet at the same time - pretty much steal the book from underneath the rest of the cast.
But if the story and characters are pretty good, the book falters in the telling of them. In fact, that's precisely the problem: It tells too much. Rather than letting the characters' actions and realistic dialogue slowly unspool their motivations, Trollope explains endlessly. Characters provide detailed inner monologues spelling out exactly what they're thinking, then they lecture other people on why they're doing what they do, and then in their spare time they analyse different people's thinking in conversations with yet more listeners.
For instance, in a lengthy speech, Alexa tells Jack that Dan "probably loves me more than he's ever loved anyone. But he's got me now, so he's free to love all this other stuff, and that has all the urgency and thrill of the chase that I can't possibly have now that I'm his wife and the mother of his children". She also informs Dan that "You're scared ... You're afraid of what you might have done ... I don't want to open my heart to someone who is, to all intents and purposes, still miles away doing something so alien to ordinary life that it might as well be on the moon." Kate, Gus, Jack, George, Eric, and Alexa's girlfriends pile on with further words of wisdom.
Another problem is that sometimes Trollope goes overboard with her characters. Alexa's mother, Elaine Longworth, is too much of a caricature, while the twins are too adorable and Alexa is too perfect. Is everything truly Dan's fault? Does Alexa appreciate how difficult the transition is from bloodied war zone to reading bedtime stories to his kids?
Overall, The Soldier's Wife is a good read that puts real human beings behind the headlines about post-traumatic stress disorder and other problems related to the return of soldiers to civilian life. That's a topic that will become increasingly important as Nato troops gradually withdraw from Afghanistan.
Nor is this a concern only for people in uniform. In some ways being a soldier's wife is like being an expatriate's wife or husband, whether left behind in the home country or dragged along to a foreign land. The so-called "trailing spouse" has to learn to run the household with very little help from a partner who may be gone for long periods and who has been through harrowing decisions that the at-home spouse can't possibly comprehend. And the spouse may have to do all this while also trying to fit into an alien culture. At least an expat professional manager doesn't have to keep his boots shined.
Fran Hawthorne is an award-winning US-based author and journalist who specialises in covering the intersection of business, finance and social policy.