Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Balancing Act review – Joanna Trollope’s expert take on the pressure of combining family and business

Astute characterisation elevates this novel above a simple country-house portrait of family tension

Author Joanna Trollope
Joanna Trollope: 'an admirable facility for storytelling'. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
If you were only to glance at this novel, you would see that it is almost all dialogue. There is much for a novice novelist, a wannabe bestseller writer, to learn from this: Trollope has an admirable facility for telling her story through conversation, argument and in snatches – this novel, her 18th, would work as radio drama.

The plot concerns four women: a mother, Susie, and her three grown-up daughters – Cara, Ashley and Grace – who run a family business, Susie Sullivan pottery. Their boardroom is designed like a country kitchen: “Natural flooring, display cabinets resembling dressers painted in the trademark duck-egg blue and scarlet, and laden with pottery, walls of framed posters and framed tea towels, conference tables like kitchen tables, proliferations of teapots and rows of mugs on hooks, all of it managing to diminish almost to invisibility the necessary computer terminals and whiteboards.”

So far, so Cath Kidston. Or, I kept thinking, this hugely readable novel, with its cosily upmarket feel, would work beautifully as Waitrose’s own-brand fiction – were such a thing to exist.
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