Customer Reviews

A Village Affair

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A Village Affair takes advantage of all the skilful expertise of its author in unraveling a tale of repressed sexuality , passion and rejection set in a the quintessential English village. Alice, the mother of 3 well defined and lovable children( all children in Joanna Trollope's novels are remarkably fleshed out )moves with her husband Martin to the "Grey House" a symbol of achievement, respectablity and class , the perfect home in the perfect village setting. But Alice appears to be on the verge of a breakdown from the day they arrive... As we meet their respective families and see the lack of emotion on one hand, and overabundance of it on the other, we recognise the gaping holes that have formed in their seemingly "perfect " marriage. The lack of sexual excitement is the final - or most vital - symptom. The crisis comes when Alice meets Clodagh, the youngest daughter up at the"Big House" who has supposedly come home from New York with a broken heart. Though we are already anticipating loopholes, ready to expose the sham of Alice and Martin"s relationship, there is a delightful shock when Clodagh reveals first her preference for women , and amidst domestic bliss in Alice's home, a preference for Alice too. This is true love for both women, made ragged by the inevitable and terrible consequences for the grandparents, Martin, and in a subtle and open ended fashion, the children. Trollope has a huge gift for presenting every facet of these events without bias or critiscm,through the villagers, the vicar, inlaws and family friends. The reader is kept entranced by the unfolding tale of passionate reaction and despair resulting from a declaration of their affair by the two women. I found this one of the most engrossing Trollope novels with a sharp contemporary edge and a bittersweet ending, that left you wanting to know what would happen next in the lives of these characters. ( and ready to pick up another Joanna Trollope novel!)

Even before Alice married Martin, his parents loved her. Alice and Martin share a contented life as she paints and he works as a country solicitor. Over the years they had three children. However, after the birth of their second child, Alice stops painting. By the birth of their third child, Alice seems mentally ill as she sinks into a deep depression.

To get her out of her morass, Martin reluctantly buys the Grey House in the small village of Pitcombe. However, Alice remains unhappy and Martin does not know what to do to help her with her funk. Alice meets and falls in love with Clodagh, and the two women have an affair. Will Alice leave with Clodagh, remain with Martin, or leave both of them behind? In any case, what will happen to her children?

Best selling author Joanna Trollope is renowned for her complex, modern relationship dramas. A VILLAGE AFFAIR will leave no doubt that the author is one of the leading lights on writing daring, intelligent, and entertaining contemporary tales. The elaborate story line centers on Alice's various relationships (not all happy) with a myriad of people. Each interaction whether it is to her spouse, lover, children, in-laws, or her own biological family, seems genuine and adds to the overall worth of the novel. Fans of an authentic plot will gain much pleasure from Ms. Trollope's modern day relationship novel.

Harriet Klausner

Joanna Trollope never goes for the easy way out. All of her books are full of people that are so real, so full of the layers of "humanhood," if you will, that we can't help but feel we know everybody in her books. This is, of course, her very great talent.

"A Village Affair" is, on the surface, the story of a marriage grown slightly stale after 3 children and the predictable daily chores that accompany parenthood. Alice and Martin are settled into a comfortable, upwardly mobile, slightly boring lifestyle. Neither is particularly happy, but neither will acknowledge this fact to themselves or each other.
When Alice's third child, Charlie, is born, Alice, the quintessential latter-day flower child, falls into a deep depression that she cannot shake. As she tries to regain her equilibrium, we are taken back to her earlier years as a university student whose wretched homelife spurs her to seek the life she imagines she wants. Alice's great flaw then, and later, when we meet her several years into her marriage, is that she has no notion of herself whatsoever, but only sees herself as reflected in the mirror of others' approval or disapproval.

Thus, when Alice is a very young woman, the reflected glory of Cecily Jordan, a famous gardener/author, leads Alice to marry Cecily's son Martin, even though she is not in love with him. It is Cecily and her beautiful house that Alice loves--but she doesn't realize it for quite a while. After the marriage, Alice is happy as a young wife, artist (she paints quite well and has a small following to whom she sells her works), and quasi-hippie, her long braid and offbeat clothes advertising her "otherness" to her admiring circle of friends and neighbors.

When her first child, Natasha, is born, Alice is able to keep going in this mold. Natasha is an easy baby, Alice is even more admired as the perfect wife and mother, and things are easy. But with the birth of James, a much more difficult little person, Alice begins to unravel. And finally, the birth of Charlie destroys any illustions she may have had of a happy and fulfilled marriage.

Enter Clodagh, the youngest and very flamboyant daughter of the "big house" in the village. Clodagh has a secret...but Alice doesn't know it for quite a while. As Clodagh swiftly and surely takes over Alice's life and identity, the two begin a quite unorthodox relationship that shocks the village, destroys Alice's reputation, ruins her marriage, and makes her finally, at long last, take a look at herself as a woman and a human being.

The ending is not predictable, the characters are not one-dimensional. There is great pain in this book...and great love. As happens many times with Trollope, I felt that Alice was my dearest friend, as close to me as a sister would be. I could see her in my mind's eye, see her clothes, her beautiful hair, her children--see her paintings, her house, and her garden. I understood completely where she was coming from, even when I despaired of her destructive actions.

"A Village Affair" proves once again that life is not black and white--and that things are rarely what they seem. It is written with charm, humor, compassion and warmth, almost as if Trollope herself despairs of her naughty Alice, but wants her so much to be OK at the end, as does the reader.

This book kept my interest until the very last sentence, and haunted me for days. It brings up as many questions as it answers, and offers no pat solutions. It is just, plain and simple, a story of ordinary, and very likeable, people.

This was the first novel I had read by this author and I am hooked. The focus should not be on the "plot" but on the incredible ability Ms. Trollope has to involve you in her characters' lives. I highly suggest that you give this book a chance. Trust me!

The plot has been sufficiently detailed above. The virtues of JA's novels are well illustrated here--her conscientiously easy, fluid, unpretentious style (a la 'good writing does not seem like good writing'), her ensemble of complications, her detailing of the pains of parenting (the whole caboodle,from gooey diapers to the adult-child brat). In the fashion of two eminent post-war moralists (Graham Greene and Eric Rohmer, with a soupcon of Camus/Sartre), JT offers a variety of characters who offer a variety of judgments on the case; each character, whether grocer or literature professor, speaks like a moral philosopher (shades of a Moravia story), with the arch-druidessa's offering judgments that seem/appear most probably closest to the author's own (and a terribly English judgment it is, not at all American: middle Graham Greene). The ITV production, available on DVD, offers an excellent rendering, with the redoubtable Claire Bloom as earth-goddess/frisson queen mother-in-law, and Kerry Fox as the brat from hell. Well worth a read and a viewing. The whole might well serve a discussion group: Is the author too easy on some characters and too hard on others? Does the proffered exoneration--things are more "complicated" than...--justify gross cruely to one's spouse? Etc., etc.

A Village Affair

Very easy to read and thought it was really good, although wish the ending could have be different!

This was the first novel I had read by this author and I am hooked. The focus should not be on the "plot" but on the incredible ability Ms. Trollope has to involve you in her characters' lives. I highly suggest that you give this book a chance. Trust me!

I have never read a Trollope novel before, but I was given a copy of THE VILLAGE AFFAIR by one of my daughters recently, so I ploughed my way through it. I think it must have added at least half a stone to my weight, since it required much munching of crisps, sweets and sandwiches to keep me awake as I read. The plot was intrinsically interesting, being about a young married woman Alice who, with her husband, an up-and-coming lawyer, moves to an enviably substantial house in a Wiltshire village where everyone votes Conservative. Alice is unexplainably miserable, discontented in spite of her faithful husband Martin, three healthy children and her acquisition of `The Grey House' which is the envy of many--miserable, that is, until she meets the vivacious foxy-loxy Clodagh, youngest daughter of Lady Unwin from the Big House. Just returned from New York, over-paid, over-sexed and over here (in Pitcombe), Clodagh is your Becky Sharp look-alike (wide cheeks, small chin) that no man or woman can resist, with her lively and electrifying spirit. Of course, miserable Alice is electrified into new life under her touch.

The consequences are disastrous. Alice comes alive, can paint again, loves everyone more than ever under this new awakening experience--apart from her husband Martin, of course, who, innocent, befuddled and confused by the turn of events, now seems dull and boring, like Pitcombe itself, aghast under the shock of the explosion of this lesbian firebomb. The fallout is so severe that both women, the cause of the eruption, have to move out.

What sticks in one's mind is that lives are carelessly destroyed, and I wondered if Trollope was actually trying to engage the reader's sympathy for Alice, the main character--I wondered, because, if anything, Alice's behaviour, her abiding misery that lies at the heart of her betrayal, seems groundless, and, if anything, I found my sympathies rushing unstoppably towards poor Martin, the betrayed husband who, poor chap, has to resort to masturbating "messily" in the bathroom (having been denied the marriage bed), and can almost be forgiven for going berserk, one night, when he clumsily attempts to rape his wife.

Was Trollope's intention to create sympathy for Alice? Well, yes, I suppose so. I recall a comment Graham Greene once made, that the novelist's intention is the create sympathy for the person normally outside society's normal sphere of sympathy. In 1966 Truman Capote published a book called IN COLD BLOOD in which he attempted to get into the mind if a serial killer, a cold-blooded murderer--having even interviewed the man (in prison) on which the main character was based. That seems to be the job of a writer--to create sympathy for, to help one understand people, to get into the mind of people, to know what makes them tick--people one normally relegates to severe judgment. But if Trollope wanted to help us understand better the motives of Alice, then I think she failed--for Alice (like most of the characters) are manifestly superficial. Given the devastatingly effects of her conduct, the way she unresistingly drifts into the arms (the wiles, one is tempted to say), of Clodagh, a selfish psychopathic predator, regardless of the consequences, one sees her as spineless and selfish rather than a bitterly and deeply unhappy woman who, at least, might make a valiant attempt to resist temptation.

Lesbian and gay relationships are acceptable in these enlightened "end times", of course, so that would not be sufficient grounds today to turn against poor Alice--or Clodagh. "Whatever works," as Woody Allan says in his recent movie by that name. My main difficulty with Trollope's novel is that Alice's betrayal, her inherent misery prior to the betrayal, and her subsequent escape, just wasn't convincing. And as for Clodough, well, she is little more than a foil for Alice, and like Alice, paper-thin, though perhaps a little less so than Alice: at least as a caricature, with her foxy face and red hair, she lingers a little longer in the memory!

I am an avid fan of Joanna Trollope but this book was boring and tedious. I couldn't wait to finish it so I could put myself out of my misery. I much preferred A Spanish Lover and The Men and The Girls.

The cover of this book hinted of an affair, but not that it was between two women. I would not have read the book if I had known, because, though I have no problem accepting gay lifestyles, I could not relate to these characters. Also, the main character seemed to just fall into this affair because she was bored with life. This lack of motivation weakened her as a character and made the story less believable.