Tag: 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.

 

 

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

There are two types of people when it comes to Fay Weldon. Those who love her and those who hate her for “selling out” with The Bulgari Connection.

I’d rather read a carefully plotted novel of revenge and rebirth with the odd mention of a certain posh jeweler than read the celebrity sponsored Twitter feeds of…ohhhh…Charlie Sheen, Kim K, Lindsey Lohan and the rest of them bishes. Fay Weldon is GOD…okay maybe a better term is….She-Devil!

For those of you old enough to remember the late 1980s, you might remember an awful film starring one Miss Rosanne Barr and a slumming Meryl Streep. Plot? Ugly wife has cute accountant hubby stolen by a famous romance writer. Ugly wife vows vengeance and the cheating hubby and his amour get theirs while our ugly heroine builds a better life. Roseanne had a honking mole on her face.

That piece of tripe with a cutesy Hollywood ending was based an stellar novel by one Fay Weldon.

Now Fay Weldon is a master of the social novel. Her writing is razor sharp and captures the struggle between the sexes. Females aren’t always sisters in the Great War. Men can be used and lead astray.

And there is always that special something to elevate one of her novels beyond the norm. You can pick up a Weldon novel decades after it was first published and it still feels fresh and ground breaking.

The titular she-devil of Weldon’s novel is the plain, six foot two Ruth, mother of Nicola and Andy, wife to handsome accountant Bobbo. Yes, there is a grown-ass man called Bobbo. But it’s England. Here in the USA we have dudes called Bubba. Ruth has always considered herself a good wife.

However Bobbo isn’t the ideal husband (because if he was this wouldn’t be a Fay Weldon novel) leaving Ruth for the dainty, blonde romance writer Mary Fisher and a new life at Mary’s cliffside seaside estate. Ruth has the fate of taking the children, moving to  a council flat and quietly struggling as a single mother looming in her near future.

But Bobbo and Mary’s perfect new life together crumbles. The happy couple is burdened with Nicola and Andy and then Mary’s elderly mother.  Bobbo’s business comes crashing down thanks to a fraud investigation. Mary’s books lose their glitter and her sales plummet. Bobbo goes to jail and Mary Fisher goes from a glamorous blond sprite to an ordinary woman worried by the house, bills and losing her man.

And what’s the force behind all the misfortune? Ruth, spiritually re-born as a She-Devil, who in a series of carefully planned and cunning (am I the only one who heard “cunning” in Blackadder’s voice? Okay…just me then…) moves destroys Bobbo and Mary as she changes her life to suit her new nature.

With each new identity (Vesta Rose, Polly Patch, Molly Wishant, Marlene Hunter) Ruth sheds more of her old self and body until she achieves her ultimate goal: to have everything belonging to Mary Fisher’s right down to her house, lovers, career and very body.

How many Danielle Steel heroines are willing to commit arson, fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and endure medical techniques that have the cutting edge of just in the range of the possible to achieve their ends?

Definitely snap up The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. And if you ever run across the 1986 BBC adaption with Patricia Hodge and Julie T. Wallace…you are in for a treat!