Book Review - The Soldier’s Wife by Elaine Longworth

Friday, February 03, 2012 3:15 PM

It would be reductive to say there are stock players in the novels of Joanna Trollope, but just as there are themes to which she returns time and again, there are also some recurring character types. The Soldier’s Wife’s Elaine Longworth, mother of the titular Alexa, is reminiscent of the matriarch Rachel of Daughters-in-Law; both women are over-invested in their children, possibly because of their affectionately detached husbands. Alexa, meanwhile, has the same vaguely panicked reaction to sudden destabilization as The Other Family’s Chrissie, and while the two women’s marriages founder for very different reasons, their insecurities will define their families’ fates.

But unlike those two most recent installments in Trollope’s impressive oeuvre of psychologically perceptive family dramas, The Soldier’s Wife feels insubstantial, a cobbled-together clutch of thoughts on separation and forced unity that never quite hangs together.

Alexa, herself the product of a nomadic diplomatic upbringing, is now married to a British army major and raising her older daughter Isabel and three-year-old twins in a similar lifestyle. As Dan Riley returns to his family from six months in Afghanistan, it becomes apparent that his devotion to duty is the result of both nature and nurture. Dan’s paternal great-uncle Ray was a casualty of the Great War, while his grandfather Eric, Ray’s much younger brother, served in World War II and later in Aden.

The military days of Dan’s father George, who has every bit as much trouble getting Dan’s attention as Alexa does, included time in the Falklands in 1982, and one of the novel’s few truly affecting moments comes when George, whisky-sodden and fretful, dwells on a grim South Atlantic night spent with the body of a colleague. In this way and others (Dan’s visit to badly maimed soldiers; Alexa’s pained refusal of a job offer she has longed for), Trollope reminds us that war collects a wage from everyone it touches.

Alexa’s high pain threshold befits the fear with which she lives and reflects what she has already endured – long separations from Dan, the stress of sole parenting, and the death of her first husband, Isabel’s father, when their daughter was an infant. Alexa, more than anyone, is shocked to find upon Dan’s return that their strong union has become fractious, and her dismay is heightened by Isabel’s unhappiness and Dan’s blindness to the emotional states of his loved ones.

In fact, no two people ever seem to be looking at one another at the same time: just as Alexa is yearning for her husband’s attention, Isabel resorts to running away from her boarding school in a pitiful bid for help. It is during an urgent summit with Elaine and Morgan that George acknowledges the dangers of Dan’s professional absorption, as he at once condemns and excuses his son: “Nothing blinkers a man like soldiering. Nothing.”

Trollope seems aware that the novel’s tension swiftly becomes grating, and at mid-point uses supporting characters to remind us that such conflict is standard in military marriages. It doesn’t have the gut-punch effect she may have been aiming for.

Afterwards, we wonder: will Dan acknowledge the vulnerability of his family structure in time to prevent it collapsing altogether? For someone so expansively competent in the stress of battle, his capacity for managing strain on the homefront is oddly restricted.