Category: Fay Weldon

Kehua!

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Scene from earlier this morning:

Blacklight: <standing at the sideboard looking at his weekly pill organizer> “Gwen. Is today Wednesday?”

Me: “Yes!”

Blacklight: “Are you sure today is Wednesday?”

<cue me growling from Mr Couch>

Blacklight: <holding up the Fay Weldon novel Kehua!> “Let me guess. Pink cover. British girl book?”

<cue flames coming from the top of my head>

Well, Blacklight did get some of it right. The cover of Kehua! is pink. And Fay Weldon is a British author. But I wouldn’t exactly bundle Kehua! into the chick lit box. Even if it’s not my favorite Fay Weldon book ever (The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil) Kehua! is oceans better than oh say….Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (My Inner Critic: “Darling even We Like Kindergarten with the horrid little girl with the undead eyes that see beyond seeing is better than Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy…” My Inner Critic? Does have a point.)

Even with it’s oceans better than Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy status, I am of two minds about Kehua!. One part of me is jumping up and down and shrieking in mad joy over having a new (well new to me in America) Fay Weldon to devour. Yes, I know there are her Habits of the House books but I’m not feeling those novels even though I know darn well Fay Weldon wrote for the original Upstairs, Downstairs. My preferred Fay Weldon books are her very sharp novels of modern (20th century/21st century) life and manners. I want feminists and scandal and improbable names and people with causes and missions. Kehua! delivers with characters Scarlet, Cynara and Lola. And matriarch Beverly? Some of her adventures are pure young Fay Weldon as a single mum and others? I want a volume of nothing but Beverly’s memoirs STAT (oh wait…why don’t I just re-read Auto da Fay because that is as close as I’m going to get.) There are secrets upon secrets and the lives of women and what we learned from our mothers. And then there is the other part of me.

Now this second part of me groaned, read the first 50 pages, put Kehua! down for almost a week and once I did decide to keep reading could not get through parts of Kehua! fast enough. A Fay Weldon book should last no longer than an Aero bar or a Magnum Double Caramel ice cream or a Starbucks tall hot chocolate no whip cream around me. A Fay Weldon book should be devoured and send me to Amazon and the library to scoop up my favorites. Even the seemingly endless The Hearts and Lives of Men gets devoured and let’s face it, I lose count of how many times Nell’s parents get together and break up because it’s more than the main couple on an 1980s soap opera. Okay, let’s get super real, The Hearts and Lives of Men IS a 1980s soap opera but I still devoured it.

But Kehua!? It was more making dinner from potluck leftovers versus a candy bar and chips.  It’s both the story of Beverly and her female descendants AND our unknown writer writing a book about the characters and her own possibly supernatural adventures in her home as she’s writing the we’re reading. For some people, this device is going to be the most brilliant thing ever. For me? Too jarring for reading Kehua! but if you got the money to make a top notch miniseries (like Case Histories) then I’m all for it. (But who to cast as our Fay Weldon Expy? Helen Mirren is much too young.) The two stories of Kehua! work much better as two short novels like Weldon’s brilliant The Spa Decameron (with a Fay Weldon Expy of it’s own) and The Heart of the Country. I wanted more of Beverly’s New Zealand girlhood, her adventures with Dionne and more of the possible ghosts haunting the author if she was being haunted or was she experiencing a time slip? The tidbits we get in this book aren’t enough to fully satisfy but you will not starve for plot. Maybe I’m just greedy.

Still a middling Fay Weldon novel (a middling novel from Fay Weldon is another writer at the top of their game) is better than no more Fay Weldon novels ever. I fear the day of no more Fay Weldon. She is not immortal or even de-aging like Grace appears to in the much criticized The Bulgari Connection. Age has not dimmed Fay Weldon’s sharp wit or observing eye in the least. And I’m grateful Europa Editions is publishing her and beyond grateful for the Anglophile at my local library who used our library’s tiny new book budget to snap up Kehua! instead of whatever author is trying to get some of that sweet Fifty Shades/Twilight market. Not everyone blindly reads the New York Times Best Seller list. And hopefully even a middling Fay Weldon (remember not a bad thing) will inspire a reader to explore her other work.  Beverly is a most interesting lady and even her dutiful Alice has surprising hidden layers. Lola? She has the potential to live a life even more full of twists and turns than her great-grandmother Beverly. And even with it’s flaws (this could have been two brilliant short novels, D’Dora kept making me think of D’orothea from Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City) Kehua! is most welcome to haunt my bookshelves.

 

 

Chalcot Crescent

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

One day I’m going to be checking out CNN on my lunch break and shriek “NOOO!”. Then my co-workers will turn around and wonder if I’ve lost my damn mind. And on that day I’m going to set a new land/space record for getting from the 3rd floor of Company X to the local library’s basement fiction section and dumping a stack of Fay Weldon novels on the checkout desk. Like it or not, Fay Weldon is in her EIGHTIES just like the heroine Frances in Chalcot Crescent.

If you’re read or at least heard of Fay Weldon you know she’s notorious for a razor sharp eye and wit. And she doesn’t hesitate to mine her own life for a fascinating tale. Chalcot Crescent, set as TV-Tropes.org calls Twenty Minutes Into The Future is Weldon’s imaging of what her younger sister would have been like if in reality Margaret Weldon hadn’t suffered a miscarriage when Fay was two years old.

The youngest Weldon sister Frances is clever, attractive and willing to do whatever she has to grab the things she wants in life even if it means a huge cost to her mother and sisters. In the Chalcot Crescent universe, Frances steals Fay’s lover and has his child and then goes onto to steal her first husband who was dating Fay. While Fay remains in the advertising world, Frances is the Weldon sister who becomes a best selling author and playwright who even in the depressing future still has a slight level of fame she leverages.

At it’s best Chalcot Crescent is a companion of sorts to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Due to natural disasters and human meddling our world has slipped into The Other. Society is now controlled by Corporations and people are trying to exist. All three novels plunge you into a world that could be hovering right outside. And all three novels are must reads.

The Bulgari Connection

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Jump in the Way Back machine to 2000/2001. There’s a new Fay Weldon novel out. But instead of the Book World going “ooooo new shiny book good” there’s “whiskey tango sellout”. Why? It’s a classic Weldon tale of husbands and wives with a touch of the different. Grace McNab Salt is out of prison (trying to run down her husband’s mistress) and starting her new life as a single woman. But fate or something else has other ideas. All trails lead to a portrait of Grace’s friend Lady Juliet in a lovely white gown wearing her cherished Egyptian Bulgari necklace….

And there’s the problem. Well to the Book World as least. In exchange for a reported 18,000 pounds, Weldon agreed to mention Bulgari at least twelve times. Thus the sellout allegations. With a lesser author (coughcoughdeankoontzstephenkingpatboothcoughcough) I would run the frosted pop tart the other way.

But Weldon? Interesting…and worth a read. The two Bulgari necklaces, Lady Juliet’s Egyptian masterpiece and Doris’ Roman coins, are compelling. The eternal Egyptian, sought after and cherished. The Roman coins, an empire won and lost. Now add intrigue, new loves, shady business connections and you have a winner.

The Bulgari Connection isn’t the perfect Weldon novel (my vote goes to The Life and Loves of a She-Devil) but it’s good Weldon, something you can re-read and enjoy. Try to get to the last few pages and not be flipping back to reference a comment in the earliest chapters. And as for the reported 18,000 pounds…good on you Fay Weldon git paid girl you git yours!