Book review: The Soldier’s Wife

IT’S A LONG time since Joanna Trollope was regarded – or indeed dismissed in rather patronising style – as a writer of Aga-sagas. She is a serious novelist with the knack of hitting on issues of importance today and exploring them with intelligence.

Since she has also the ability to tell a story and to create characters who are convincing and usually likeable, her novels are enjoyable and rewarding.

As the title suggests, her new novel is about the army life and especially about the strains this imposed on husbands, wives and their families. Major Dan Riley returns from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. His wife Alexa knows that there will be a period of readjustment for both of them. She doesn’t at first realise just how difficult this will be. For six months Dan has been with his other family: the army. Alexa has no doubt that she loves Dan, no doubt either that he loves her, and the children – Isobel, her daughter by her first husband, who died of a brain tumour, and their three-year-old twin girls. Yet the reunion is difficult. Dan is home, but in a sense he is still absent. Meanwhile, Alexa is dissatisfied with being only a wife and mother, and when Dan was away she applied for a teaching job, while Isobel is miserable at boarding-school.

The novel offers domestic tensions, as we expect from Joanna Trollope, and these are well devised and dramatised. But it is also alert to the difficulties that arise from changes in the balance between the sexes, and in particular by the way in which women – married women – now demand that their individuality be recognised. The older army wives in the novel have been content to accept that their husbands exist in two marriages, that they are in effect bigamists, married not only to them but also to the army. They accept too that for much of the time their role must be secondary; that, in short, the army comes first, and that they must therefore accept the uncertainties, upheavals and discontinuities this imposes on them. Alexa is not alone in rebelling against this, or in feeling that while her rebellion is natural and proper, it is also dangerous, putting everyone’s happiness at risk. Yet that happiness is already endangered, as Isobel’s quiet but determined rebellion against being consigned to boarding-school demonstrates.

Trollope is a compelling novelist for another reason. She recognises what many more fashionable novelists ignore: that most people most of the time want to behave well, want to do what is right. Her characters are not perfect, but they are all well-meaning. They try to behave in generous and responsible manner. There are no villains in this novel. Instead there are people faced with difficult choices, people struggling for understanding of each other, and sometimes failing. The drama in her novels comes not from the clash of good and evil, or even right and wrong. It stems instead from the realisation that two conflicting courses of action or states of feeling may both be justifiable, and yet incompatible. She recognises that in life it is not always possible to find solutions for difficulties. Often the most that can be hoped for is an acceptable compromise.

Trollope is also prepared to take risks. It’s well-known that Jane Austen refrained from writing big scenes between her male characters because she didn’t know – and presumably hesitated to imagine – how they talked when there were no women present. Trollope, however, gives us army talk between men – dares, that is, to give us her sense, her understanding, of how they live in their other marriage. It lets us see what Alexa and the other wives are up against. Trollope doesn’t take sides. If she has naturally a more acute sympathy for Alexa’s position than for Dan’s – finds it easier to empathise with her – she nevertheless is absolutely fair. You never feel, as Alexa sometimes does ( if against her will and even her reason), that Dan is being selfish in sometimes putting the army and his duty towards his men before what he owes his wife and children. It is natural for him to do so, though it takes his ex-RSM grandfather and his father, a Falklands veteran, to persuade him of the need to rebalance his life. Alexa too must do the same. Living properly means re-evaluating experience, learning lessons in order to arrive at a better and fairer understanding of each other.

• The Soldier’s Wife

by Joanna Trollope

Doubleday, 320pp, £18.99