The Trio: Johanna Hedman

This was not a book I warmed to. It is about three main characters (August, Thora and Hugo) and the various paths they follow through life. They are all well-educated, middle-class people and they enjoy reading, visiting museums and exhibitions and talking about art (in its widest sense). They also enrol in various courses at various places of learning, including universities. All of this could perhaps have the makings of an interesting story, but I found it quite a struggle to persevere to the end.The main problem is that the book is aimless and moves pointlessly from one location/relationship/season to another without any sense of forward movement. We don’t really know the characters any better at the end of the book than we did at the beginning – and we don’t care either. The action, such as it is, takes place in Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Brighton (UK) and New York, but their conversations barely change. These conversations revolve depressingly around what they think of other people and what other people think of them. There is endless dissection of relationships, but it is all rather like reading the diaries of insecure teenagers. Well, teenagers are entitled to their insecurities, but these people never progress beyond that and are still dissecting, bickering and accusing each other year after year after year. Near the very end of the book Hugo says, “I don’t know what you want me to say”, which is a line repeated with mind-numbing regularity throughout the book. At times the reader feels like screaming, “Get on with it”, “Get a life”, “Stop all this navel-gazing” and even “For God’s sake, grow up”.The author can certainly write well. Some descriptions of places, times of day, seasons and so on are beautifully done – but then along come the humans and the tone drops to the banality of “Do you think he likes me?” “Does it matter if he likes you?” and the rest of the tedious exchanges they unfortunately indulge in. They even fall in love, or so they claim, but the reader is left unconvinced. There is plenty of sex but even that seems as insincere as the professions of love.The book could have been half the length or twice the length and we would still have learnt the same about the characters. Half the length would have been enough for me.

Friendship to lovers to friendship – and then distance. The transition and ultimate fall-out of lives lived. A tale of three parts.The novel opens as Frances seeks out Hugo in New York, slightly in the future. She needs to find out more about her father, August, what he was like back in the day, and Hugo – now estranged from his former friendship group – is the person to ask. Frances’ mother is Thora, part of the trio of the eponymous title, she is a cool-to-cold player in the story, who eventually marries August, the third member of the group. They were all from vastly different backgrounds and hung out together in the past, over two summers in Stockholm, although it was not always an easy going set up.They all met at her parents’ apartment in Östermalm. The novel is largely devoted to the burgeoning relationship between Hugo and Thora, their viewpoints are told as the chapters alternate, and August remains largely on the sidelines, although he is very much part of the scene.It is a reworking of a story that is as old as the hills, and it is competently thought-through. Presentation is stolid and gets into its rhythm once the characters (and there are quite a few who pass through the pages) get embedded. This is the first time where I have had to write down how the characters are interconnected because for some reason I spent the first 75 pages or so being puzzled by the people who came and went and came again. I suspect this is a device of alienation, which reflects the nature of the burgeoning relationships, a little distant and unknowable, tantalising and annoying. Sliding doors moments…..For me, ultimately, the characters didn’t have the depth to really engage me in their stories, although the writing itself is very good. If you have read Trio by William Boyd, I think you will perhaps be struck by the similar take and structure of the two novels, with Trio eclipsing The Trio in its on-point humour.The locations are manifold but Stockholm remains centre stage. It gets a lot of description, it is quite evocative and a character in its own right, but like the people, it just didn’t leap off the page and engross and transport.

The Trio charts the relationships between three young adults living in Stockholm. Thora and August have been friends since childhood, but their on-off relationship is destabilised by Thora's parents' lodger Hugo, a student from Berlin. Hugo feels like an outsider in the privileged world of Thora's family, but is increasingly drawn to both Thora and August as his life becomes entwined with theirs. The majority of the novel unfolds over the course of a couple of years when they are students, but in the short introduction and conclusion, we see the effect that these events have on all three of them when they are older.The novel explores interesting ideas relating to money, class, sex and power - perhaps most interestingly the way that someone might fall in love with a couple rather than just a single person. It is somewhat reminiscent of novels like 'Normal People' and perhaps also 'Call Me By Your Name' but this novel didn't have the same beauty or insight in its writing, nor did it particularly make me care about its characters. I found the plot quite meandering, which may be a realistic reflection of how such relationships might unfold in real life but didn't make for as compelling a read as I had hoped.Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this novel to review.

Utterly boring, and nothing like Brideshead Revisited whatsoever. I was hoping for something akin to Gilbert Adair's The Dreamers, but I ended up with this tripe. Laboured through half the book when I had to give up- just a bunch of boring, bourgeois characters ambling about being boring and bourgeois.