Brother and Sister By Joanna Trollope

Anodyne adoptions

The worst thing a female writer can do, in the world of the literary novel, is tell a domestic story. Cocky male critics have decreed that feminine subject matter is inferior, fit only for the popular market, where gender antagonism creates a selling point for ChickLit and LadLit.

Joanna Trollope, writing bestsellers about middle-class women at home, was sneered at by the male-dominated literary establishment for producing Aga Sagas. Feminist readers had other problems with her. Where other, feminist novelists criticised and subverted conventional femininity, and felt obliged to invent new forms, Trollope remained wedded to a classic version of social realism that seemed to underline the status quo.

She has become more respectable among the literati now she has changed her focus, including men as major characters and the world of work - just as feminism-lite has been accepted among the bourgeoisie, allowing you to moan about your au pair or poor bonuses in the City. Feminist subversion has shifted either towards the avant-garde or genre. Gothic horror, myths, fairy-tales and thrillers remain efficient scalpels for dissecting the bloody guts of family.

Trollope steers clear of such mess, excess and distress. She continues to tackle socially acceptable dilemmas in her reassuring way: understanding teenagers, becoming a step-parent, falling in love with the wrong person, getting divorced. She has returned to the origins of the novel in the problem pages of 18th-century newspapers. You could read Brother and Sister as the response to an agonised plea from a correspondent: is it a good idea, if one is adopted, to trace one's birth mother and father? Will this process, this discovery, upset one's life, one's spouse, one's friends?

Trollope's protagonists, Nathalie and David, have grown up in the same family, but are both adopted, born to different mothers. Now in their mid-thirties, in more or less secure partnerships with children, they remain close friends. Having insisted they swallowed the consoling myth of being specially chosen, both are astonished to discover that becoming parents has given them a need to know their origins.

The trainee counsellor Stella, a tall and beautiful young woman doing research on identity and adoption, is the catalyst. We know Stella is a baddie because she not only spouts psychobabble but dresses in scarlet and black, wears big boots, has short hair, looks androgynous and is sexually predatory. When she inspires first Nathalie and then David to embark on the search for their birth mothers, we know there will be tears before, during and after bedtime.

Notwithstanding this spot of infidelity, the hunt for the birth parents begins. Fathering, in both cases, was a swift ejaculation followed by flight. It is the lost mothers who bear the brunt of resentment. These two women are swiftly found. The meetings take place. Nathalie and David return to their respective families, ready to deal with the future.

Trollope writes tenderly about children. Her portraits of tempestuous two-year-old Petey and bright five-year-old Polly are humorous and compassionate. Children, she seems to suggest, can move us to tears with their needs and vulnerability, can drive us crazy with their demands, but cannot hurt us in the way that other adults can. These sweet children may have tantrums but do not suffer real, lasting pain.

Similarly, the real pain of the grown-up children, ostensibly her subject, is smoothed over. Trollope keeps the suffering at bay by remaining firmly in control of her plot. Her omniscient voice intrudes even when writing within one consciousness. The language is flat, sprinkled with clichés. There is no messy unconscious in this novel. It slips down like warming medicine, or comfort food.

Michèle Roberts's latest novel is 'The Mistressclass' (Little, Brown)