20. City of Friends by Joanna Trollope
This is like a slightly frumpy Lace, where all the heroines are middle-aged and one of them has been sacked from her high-powered corporate finance job for asking to work flexibly so she can care for her ageing mother. It's not quite my first stinker of the year, but it came perilously close.
I used to like Joanna Trollope when she was queen of the Aga Saga in the 1980s and 1990s. She got a lot of flak for the cosy middle-classness of her novels, but I appreciated her skills at characterisation and her depictions of family life. My library was offering the audiobook of City of Friends as one of their monthly readalong titles (I think for International Women’s Day!!!), so I thought I'd see what JT was up to these days - I'd read her update of Sense and Sensibility, but nothing else written in the last 12 years, I think. It turns out that she's gone both down and over the hill.
Four friends meet on an economics course at University, among the very few girls in the room, and decide that they're going to be rich and powerful when they grow up. Stacey becomes a senior partner in a private equity form, Gaby goes off to New York before returning to break balls in the UK, Melissa seems to be a hotshot management consultant, and Beth has invented a whole new field of study (business psychology 
) and is now a media professor living in a splendidly restored Georgian house in Spitalfields. The four of them (they and their partners refer to them as "The Girls", as if anyone would ever do that) stay in touch despite the pressures of their terribly high-powered lives, an unbreakable bond having been formed when they met in that economics lecture room. So far, so 80s-bonkbuster – and I would have been well up for a “where are they now?” tongue-in-cheek update of Lace, no matter how silly. Unfortunately, this takes itself far too seriously for that.
The characters are only 4 years older than me (I think they're 47 or 48 at the start) but don't feel like it! They all live in ridiculously unattainable areas of London - Holland Park, Kensington, etc., in houses that they seem to have bought in their twenties. Their university days feel as if they took place in the 60s or the 80s, not in the early 90s! Likewise, they lead staid but luxurious lives that feel a generation apart from me. There's a worthy attempt to show the strain of juggling work with caring responsibilities, but it all feels a bit tick-boxy, as if it's been researched from a Telegraph article rather than based on real-life experience.
The dated feel extends to the children, who are all of the achingly middle class and mildly rebellious but fundamentally decent sort found in every single JT book. My DCs are still in junior school, but the cultural markers feel off to me. Teenage boys who listen to heavy metal rather than grime or trap? Teenage girls who all wear ballet flats?? Who use Facebook?!
There's a weird fixation with nails - all The Girls have "natural" nails (good taste, you see), whereas the au pairs have blue or green polish (vulgar) and the teenagers have chipped toenail varnish (
). There's also a very ill-advised sub-plot involving a romance between one character and her son's teacher, which is glossed over with no mention of potential ethical or safeguarding concerns. I think JT is really showing her age here.
I listened to the audiobook, which was slightly ruined for me by some ridiculous accents. Gaby spends only a couple of years in NY but goes from sounding like Ruth Madoc to affecting a weird transatlantic twang like Loyd Grossman; the American Sarah drawls like Scarlett O'Hara; and Scottish Beth is given a gruff, gravelly voice, presumably to show that she’s both Intellectual and also A Lesbian. (Incidentally, every Beth I've known has been terribly English - all the Scottish Elizabeths have been (E)liza, Liz or Lizzie. Beth just sounds wrong to me, but I'd be interested if any of the Scots on here could confirm!)
It's not a terrible book, but it did ultimately feel like a waste of time, and I’m certainly going to be more wary of reading recent Joanna Trollope in future (I'll stick to The Choir and The Rector's Wife instead).