The Balancing Act of the English family

Here is a bla­tantly upper mid­dle-class British fam­ily. They work to­gether in a pot­tery-mak­ing busi­ness and this is the story of what hap­pens to them in an event­ful pe­riod of change in all of their lives.

Joanna Trol­lope, a for­mer chair of the UK's Or­ange Prize for books, has re­cently made the main­stream news with her com­ments crit­i­cis­ing UK lit­er­ary fes­ti­vals for their com­mer­cial­ism. She has said that she “feared fes­ti­vals pa­tro­n­ised au­di­ences and cre­ated a hi­er­ar­chy of 'fame' - pay­ing celebri­ties to at­tend and treat­ing some fic­tion au­thors with a lack of re­spect.”

In this book, her most re­cent of twenty ti­tles, she shows a tal­ent for de­scrib­ing awk­ward so­cial re­la­tion­ships - the si­lences, pauses and hes­i­ta­tions - that can be typ­i­cal of in­ter­ac­tions among peo­ple, es­pe­cially those of the con­stant tea-drink­ing kind that she has cho­sen to focus on.

The au­thor has a gen­uine feel for Eng­land, that dreary Eng­land with its love of order in the nest: in this case a quaint, cot­tagy, dec­o­ra­tive, pas­toral land with ever-pre­sent flow­ers and the sooth­ing ef­fect of pat­terns and comfy sofas. Most of all there is the dream of quiet “dig­nity” - a word that is pre­ten­tiously re­peated in the book. These are all el­e­ments of ap­par­ently-charis­matic mother-hen Susie's busi­ness. Her daugh­ters and their men-folk have, until now, fit­ted into the flow of her com­pany. But dra­mas are a-com­ing of course. What would a book of this type be with­out some push and pull?

Here, there are nanny prob­lems and Susie's hus­band is mov­ing out to restart his music ca­reer. Most of all, the ar­rival in town of Mor­ris, her long-es­tranged fa­ther com­pli­cates things for every­one. Even­tu­ally, Mor­ris is re­deemed with a sen­si­tiv­ity that to me was not cred­i­ble but what is be­liev­able though is that the other fa­thers in the story are both mod­ern and in­volved with the care of their chil­dren.

This is with­out doubt lit­er­a­ture that is tar­geted at women read­ers but the males in the story are never set-up as whip­ping boys. In fact, the fe­male char­ac­ters are largely ca­reer-minded and the power strug­gles in the com­pany are theirs.

For me this book doesn't re­ally de­liver what I look for in a novel. Even after reread­ing parts of it to give it a chance to find some­thing that touches me or grabs me, I was dis­ap­pointed by the or­di­nar­i­ness of the char­ac­ters and their in­ter­ac­tions. When I put my en­ergy into a book I want to have my pre­con­cep­tions chal­lenged and I want to learn new things about the species that I am a part of.

A good book (fic­tion or non-fic­tion) sits you down and shakes you up with sub­tlety or with a sledge­ham­mer: we come to know the in­sides of the main pro­tag­o­nists, as if they were in fact a newly-dis­cov­ered part of our­selves. Un­for­tu­nately, Bal­anc­ing Act lo­cates it­self in the mid­dle and doesn't sway to­ward any up­lift­ing ex­trem­i­ties.