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Tim Cribb

Second Honeymoon

by Joanna Trollope

Bloomsbury, $261

London theatre marked the 175th anniversary of the birth of  Henrik Ibsen in 2003 with  The Lady From the Sea,  Brand and  The Master Builder. This year  (May 23, to be precise), is the centenary of his death, and  Joanna Trollope's tribute is the beguilingly clever  Second Honeymoon.

Central to the story is Ibsen's powerful 1881  drama  Ghosts, like many of his plays a scathing critique of 19th-century morality.

More than a few critics have noted the relevance of Ghosts  in these overly moralistic times, and Second Honeymoon is   thinly veiled attack on the minority that would seek to dictate contemporary English middle-class 'family values'.

On the surface, there's  nothing inherently amiss - Trollope peoples her story  with Anglo-Saxon heterosexuals  of sound English stock who went to good schools and live in relatively nice bits of London.

Ben, the youngest child  at 23, has just moved out of the family home to live with his girlfriend, and Edie, his mother,  is somewhat distraught at the departure - far more so than when her other children, Matthew and Rosa, flew the nest.

The three-storey house is now empty of all save Russell, her 56-year-old husband, and their cat, Arsie (named for football  club Arsenal). Russell sees Ben's departure as a relief, a chance to get back his wife after 27 years  of motherhood.

Edie sees things differently and, ignoring his increasingly romantic overtures, plans instead to revive her acting career. A  half-hearted audition lands  her the role of Helene Alving  in a production of Ghosts by  a small but well-regarded repertory company with West  End aspirations.

Having set the stage,  Trollope turns up the spotlights  as each of the children makes a return to the familial home as their relationships fall apart.

Rosa ditches a boyfriend everyone warned her about and  is left with maxed-out credit cards,  no job and nowhere to  live. Russell initially vetoes a return to the now empty nest.

Matthew, who finds the unpredictability of weather 'vaguely threatening', feels he can no longer keep up with Ruth, a 32-year-old junior headhunter,  who's driven by the belief that, 'You couldn't, as a woman,  make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate  a man's weaknesses.'

Ben, trying to wean his girlfriend away from her mother, with whom they've both been living at the end of the line in  Walthamstow, finds himself  back home sleeping on the  couch, his only recently vacated room now occupied by Rosa, whose own room has been  taken by half-starved actor  Lazlo, Edie's doomed stage- son Osvald, whom she rescued from Kilburn.

Into the mix Trollope adds Edie's sister, Vivienne (who's at first separated from, then reunited with her philandering husband, Max) and their son Eliot (who communicates by phone from  his increasingly Australian life in Cairns with his girlfriend, Ro).

Various  confidants act as muses to the main characters,  or provide impetus to the storyline, which the dust-jacket fairly describes as 'the domestic nuances and dilemmas of life  in present-day England'.

Trollope has built a considerable following through the realism of her stories, which in Second Honeymoon will ring true for Britons, Australians,  New Zealanders and Canadians. Americans unfamiliar with the English may not experience quite the same frisson, but the subtext is fairly clear.

At the heart of Second Honeymoon lies the debate  about what constitutes a family. Only about one-third of couples in  Britain now get married,  part of a general rejection of  the institution itself and its  religious overtones. However, only marriage is recognised  as the legitimate union. Indeed, the provision in England and Wales last December of civil partnerships for same-sex  couples in lieu of marriage was crafted in such a way as to withhold recognition of de facto heterosexual couples, who are still deemed to be 'living in sin' and their children 'bastards'.

Hong Kong similarly rejects  de facto relationships, although Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many other countries  have no issue with recognising two people of whatever gender living together in a mutually  dependent relationship.

For the Norwegian playwright  Ibsen, who earned in his lifetime international recognition for  the social commentary of his dramas, hypocrisy was his nemesis, particularly when  reality and purported morality radically diverged.

Ibsen is all about moral dilemmas, which is Trollope's territory, too.

In 2003, Ibsen became the most performed playwright  in Britain, after Shakespeare, which goes to something George Bernard Shaw wrote of the father of modern drama: that he gives us 'not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situation'. The same can be said of Trollope today, although her touch is lighter.

Just as Ghosts is considered  a play about rediscovering 'the joy of life', so too is Second Honeymoon. And as Ghosts is about what critics call the need  to shed dead ideas and moral conventions, so is this book.

Second Honeymoon is a sensitive, subtle and beautifully written tale about letting go of the past, because, as Edie says, 'there is no time like the present ... if you wanted a future'.



Second Honeymoon