Product Description

Fay Weldon in top gear: a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding novel that tells the story of Frances, Fay's never-born younger sister. Its 2013 and eighty-year-old Frances (part-time copywriter, has-been writer, one-time national treasure) is sitting on the stairs of Number 3, Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, listening to the debt collectors pounding on her front door. From this house she's witnessed five decades of world history - the fall of communism, the death of capitalism - and now, with the bailiffs, world history has finally reached her doorstep. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes (not that she has an agent any more, or that her books are still published, or even that there are any publishers left). She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay, about her daughters and their children. She writes about the Shock, the Crunch, the Squeeze, the Recovery, the Fall, the Crisis and the Bite, about NUG the National Unity Government, about ration books, powercuts, National Meat Loaf (suitable for vegetarians) and the new Neighbourhood Watch. She writes about family secrets...The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances' mind. Is it her writer's imagination, or is it just old age, or plain paranoia? Are her grandchildren really plotting a terrorist coup upstairs? Are faceless assassins trying to kill her younger daughter? Should she worry that her son in law is an incipient megalomaniac being groomed for NUG's highest office? What on earth can NUG have against vegetarians? And just what makes National Meat Loaf so tasty?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17304 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"* 'Fay Weldon is a national treasure.' - Literary Review * 'Prolific and provocative, Fay Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists' - Time Out * 'elegant, deadly... there's simply no touching Weldon as a writer' - Observer * 'Weldon's style, that virtuoso of intelligence and insinuating garrulousness, achieves a kind of ideal equilibrium between therapy and gossip' - The Times"

About the Author
Fay Weldon was brought up in New Zealand. She read Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London. She later began to write full-time. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE. She lives in Dorset with her husband, the poet Nick Fox.

Customer Reviews

bonkers but brilliant
I bought this book after reading a review that claimed the book was "extremely good, but really rather bonkers". My mother had been persuading me to read Fay Weldon for ages, so I thought I'd give this one a go. I can tell you that the reviewer was exactly right! As a whole, the novel is brilliant - very funny, lots of sharp one-liners, and some wonderful insight on what life was once like, and what it might be like in the future. And the plot is pretty strange... The book is told from the point of view of Frances,a sister that Fay never actually had, who is now aged eighty and is living in the near future (2013). Frances has clearly lived a life very like Fay Weldon's real life - become a famous author, married lots of times, been something of a feminist, etc - while her sister, the fictional 'Fay', is a struggling cookery writer living in Australia. I'll have a go at outlining what happens, though it might be better to just read the book without knowing the plot, as there are surprises around every corner.

Frances is trying to hide from the bailiffs who want to take her Primrose Hill house in lieu of her debts. All the banks have collapsed during the Crunch (sound familiar?!) which was followed by the Shock, the false Recovery and then in 2013 the Bite. No-one has any money, except maybe the sinister-sounding government, who have sealed up everyone's back doors, and have CCTV on every street corner. Food is scarce and everyone lives off National Meat Loaf, which may (or may not) have something to do with government scientists and human meat...

At the same time as telling us all of this, Frances (aged eighty) is recounting her life story, which is hilarious as well as being fascinating, as we are (I'm pretty sure) supposed to guess that this is really based on Fay Weldon's own life. There are lots of interesting and funny musings on things like feminism, art and fate; some great descriptions of what life was like in various decades (she characterises the middle-classes in the seventies when she shouts at her daughter 'Venetia, time for supper, your avocado is ready!')

And, simultaneous with the 'real time' (Frances hiding from the bailiffs, worrying about her grandchildren, talking to her daughters) and the 'past time' (Frances telling her life story), Frances also becomes less and less sure what is real and what is not. So you get this sense of sliding in and out of reality - perhaps because of her old age, or maybe just because she is a writer and used to fiction. Sometimes Frances tells you when she is writing fiction and when it's fact, other times its up to the reader to figure it out.

All of this adds up to a really satisfying read. Its darkly funny, sharp, witty and insightful, as well as being completely original, which is a rare treat these days. I think it would be a perfect book for a bookclub as there is just so much to talk about: unreliable narrator; power of government; fact v fiction; old age; memory; does fate exist; parallel universes; feminism; the role of the past in interpreting the present. Phew! such a lot in a small book!

A rather strange book from a divergent mind!
I've enjoyed many of Fay Weldon's Books and know that she can be very imaginative and this book is certainly full of surprises. It's an amalgam of bits of the author's life; mixed with dystopic visions of what the future will be like after the upheavals caused by the credit crunch; and nostalgic reflections about what life was like in the good times. The book is set in 2013 when Britain is a totalitarian state and is loosely held together by the narrator, Frances's, complicated interactions with her extended family and ex-husbands. It's a bit like Orwell's 1984, but written in Weldon's spritely style and full of humour. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as some of her earlier books as it flitted about a lot with disconnected chapters and so many characters coming and going that I sometimes couldn't remember who was whom.