~ Mum and Dad, by Joanna Trollope ~
Southern Spain. A middle-aged English expatriate couple, Gus and Monica, purchase some land and set up a vineyard. They abandon their oldest children in boarding schools in England, bring the youngest with them to Spain, and settle there for the rest of their lives. Or so they expect.
Two decades later, Gus has a stroke. Monica’s routine life falls apart, and their three children — Sebastian, Katie and Jake, who have not seen Gus and Monica for years — descend upon the household. Each has their own problems: Sebastian is married to the dominating Anna; Katie is a hardworking lawyer with troubled daughters; Jake is a relaxed charmer with a wife and adorable two-year-old, secretly sinking under financial problems.
This is the first Trollope novel I have read, and from the descriptions of her other novels, this one is typical in that she writes about family, relationships, and the dynamics within marriages.
To me, the family problems, and especially their pat solutions, were distinctly dated despite the fact that the novel is set in modern times where teenagers post photos on social-media sites. The reader is meant to sympathize with Sebastian’s henpecked life, and cheer him on when he displays some manly spine and behaves like a jerk.
Even though he was normally quite partial to Anna’s fishcakes, he thought, with a spurt of defiance, that he might order himself a forbidden takeaway instead. He opened the tall kitchen pedal bin with one foot and tipped the fishcakes in quickly.
Inevitably, his newly forceful behaviour results in a better relationship with Anna.
Likewise Katie is a hardworking lawyer, but of course, this means she must be a failure at motherhood. One daughter posts pictures of herself at parties kissing boys, another daughter is cutting herself, and the third complains about Katie’s lack of attention.
Florence sighed theatrically. “I’m just asking you to think about me for three minutes.”
“Darling,” Katie said, “you and Marta and Daisy are my chief preoccupations.”
“After work.”
“No.”
“Oh yes,” Florence said, nodding. “Everything comes after work.”
Set in Spain though it is, Spain serves merely as a backdrop for the English protagonists. The Spanish people work the vineyard, clean and cook in the house, and live nearby, but their lives have very little bearing on Gus and Monica’s concerns. Pilar, the housekeeper, bustles around and occasionally comments on the family dynamics, but her own life is presented as a vague mystery — lots of relatives and cousins and nieces whose names Gus and Monica barely know, lots of conversation and chatter that Gus and Monica are not a part of. Yet, when Gus has his stroke, it is Pilar and Jose Manuel who leap into the breach, keeping the vineyard going, arranging for hospital help, and maintaining the house and household for the children and their families who arrive on weekends, expecting clean rooms and food. Really, the novel could have been set anywhere — India, with equally mysterious Indian servants, or Africa, with large African families — without much change.
Sibling rivalry and resentment are neatly drawn, but without much depth.
Money, it turns out, is the root of all problems. Katie, Sebastian and Jake make it very clear that their main interest in the vineyard is their own inheritance. Even their children see it likewise:
“It’s our inheritance, all six of us, and I should go out and see it.”
The novel does not even consider the possibility that Gus and Monica, the owners of the vineyard, could leave it to someone else. (Perhaps even the hardworking Spaniards who have built and maintained it over the years?)
Money is also the solution to all problems. Katie and Sebastian are wealthy enough to bail out Jake, and Gus and Monica just happen to have an extra house in the town where Jake and family can live. Katie and her husband can afford to renovate their garage for Monica’s part-time life in England. The grandchildren’s problems are easily sorted out: Monica acts as a sounding board for Marta, Katie’s younger girls just need some attention, and Sebastian’s boys magically sort out Gus’s bad tempers.
Trollope’s writing is agreeable, with a focus on the protagonists and their reactions.
Over the years, Monica thought now, she’d got less good at accepting. At the beginning, she’d given way to Gus’s determination, bent to submit to Pilar, worried endlessly about the children, how their parents’ abrupt change of lifestyle was affecting them.
Katie couldn’t identify exactly the moment that she and Nic had started to get on each other’s nerves rather than being the team they had originally so successfully been, and she supposed that the drift apart had just begun in that imperceptible way of most relationship divides, and then gradually widened as attitudes became habits and habits had hardened.
Neither the sentence structure nor the emotions expressed are surprising or startling.
This is a pleasant enough read, but is the sort of English novel that was plentiful in British Council Libraries in ex-colonies for the last century. It tells a small, Anglo-centric story, and in 2020, this seems like a story we’ve heard many times already.
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