The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon

The Rules Of Life by Fay Weldon aspires to the feeling of a full-length novel in the guise of a small novella. In less than 30,000 words, we are presented with a science fiction scenario, a society- and even culture-wide ideological and religious shift, a transformation of our approach to death, and then, if that were not enough to make a cake, a life history and the reactions of others to it iced on top. It is a remarkable feat to bring all that off, create a complete and highly satisfying experience for the reader and to do it in an easy, but sophisticated style that is never didactic. 

 The Rules Of Life begins in a new era, that of the GNFR, the Great New Fictional Religion. Grades of priests proclaim different levels of access to truth. Not a lot new there, then! It’s an age of science, apparently, despite the general absence of anything that seems even vaguely scientific. GSWITS is a character who figures prominently in the book, but we never meet her. She, or perhaps he, is the Great Screen Writer In The Sky, and was probably a comedian in an earlier life, though few laughs are raised. 

Thus the book opens, and we expect we are to be transported into yet another clichéd distopia, full of romantic references to dysfunctional but homely aspects of the present. How easy is it for a writer to play on people’s shallow fears? But The Rules Of Life does something more subtle than this. Fay Weldon uses the scenario merely as a means to examine further – and in a different way – those apparently permanent aspects of life that have been the raw material for writers since writing began, and for people in general even before that. Ghosts have a new status in this rather cowardly new world. Lives can be replayed like cassette tapes. They can be examined, but not quite reconstructed or relived.

Our narrator, a recorder priest in the new order, has a disc to examine. It contains, he finds, the life of one Gabriela Sumpter. As he replays the dead woman’s life, he finds himself ever more engaged in her experience. A relationship develops between them as Gabriela relates her life story. 

 The point of The Rules Of Life may be that no matter how much human society changes its assumptions, its organisation or even its adopted values, there are aspects of life that remain immutable, perhaps inevitable. But despite inevitability, each individual experiences these givens of human existence in what – at least at the personal level – feels like a wholly unique way. No matter how many times we replay it, it only ever happens once. That maybe is the only rule of life.

Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon’s novel Worst Fears starts and finishes with bereavement. It examines how a woman deals with simultaneous loss and revealed betrayal. Alexandra is an actress, if I might be excused such gender specificity. She is also quite successful. She is currently appearing in a London West End production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She is therefore away from home a lot. Her husband Ned has just died, apparently discovered on the floor of the family home by a visitor. It was a sudden and massive heart attack. Alexandra wonders what might have brought it on. She takes time off work, thus allowing an understudy temporarily to take her role. 

She returns to the rickety, old, antique-stuffed cottage in the country. It is perhaps a rural idyll that now has to be rewritten. Her worst fears are that there is more than meets the eye. She also has some hopes, but from the start it seems unlikely they will be realised. She is greeted by the dog, Diamond, who seems to know something is wrong. She contacts local acquaintances, Lucy and Abbie, whom she suspects know more than they are saying. Hamish, her husband’s brother, comes to stay to help sort things out. Sascha, Alexandra and Ned’s little boy is with Irene, Alexandra’s mother. It happens often when Alexandra is away at work. 

Her husband Ned, as usual needed space at home to concentrate. He was, by the way, was an authority on theatre, a critic, an expert on Ibsen and also interested in costume design. As Alexandra delves into recent events, she discovers a tangle of interests, relationships and liaisons. All of them have implications for her, despite the fact that she was often not directly involved. The protagonists relate directly to one another. They socialise, if that might be the right word. They interact. They act. They play-act. Alexandra’s worst fears begin to materialise. Ned’s surname is Ludd. It is surely not a coincidence that he shares a name with one of the wreckers of history. He is the only developed male character in the novel, despite his being dead. He never speaks, but his presence pervades, perhaps even controls everything that the still living can do. The truths of his life have been at best partial, his interests specifically personal. It seems that the women are positioning themselves to lay claim to ownership of his memory. 

And thus recollection, rumour and revelation unfold their tangle. The above may suggest a rather one-dimensional approach towards a feminist moral, but it is much more subtle than that. This thread is there, of course, and is epitomised when Alexandra’s part in A Doll’s House – itself a play about women and emancipation – is exploited to success by her understudy via sexual stereotyping. And Worst Fears opens with two of the women involved viewing Ned’s body, their attention drawn to a part of his anatomy that is to become one of the book’s main actors. Their reverence is sincere as they genuflect before their flaccid altar. This accepted, it seems also that the book deals more fundamentally with the more universal issues of self-interest and selfishness. All of these characters, despite their often social or private relations, are in conflict. They compete with one another and even with themselves. When liberation becomes a possibility, it is revealed as no more than an opportunity for even greater self-obsession, a means of shutting out the interest of others. 

 As the plot of Worst Fears unfolds, the impression it leaves is that these accomplished, middle-class, apparently comfortable people are all still engaged in a primeval struggle for raw animal dominance. The currency that is hoarded in the process remains the same as it would have been if the characters had never evolved from quadruped apes in a forest gang. There is no liberation here, for anyone, except, that is, via their words, the very weapons they use to prod, punch, pierce the reality that effectively confines them to themselves. These could be anyone’s worst fears. View the book on amazon Worst Fears

The Heart Of The Country by Fay Weldon

For two thirds of its length, The Heart Of The Country by Fay Weldon is a brilliant, surprising, humorous, bitchy study of adopted and original rural life. Rural industries, agriculture, and yokel identity rub shoulders with antique dealers, long-distance commuters, owners of computer stores and benefit claimants. Pretty normal stuff, I hear you say.

The book examines their interactions and relationships, especially how public virtue interacts with private vice. Natalie, who was born with attributes of beauty and desirability, has suffered the confusion of many with her birthright. With the world available to her, she chose Harris, whose business acumen eventually matched his other skills.

At the start of the book, he has just gone bust, but has not told his wife or family. He has also just run away with that bit of fluff he used to see when... So Natalie, bestowed Natalie, is left penniless, mortgaged up to the hilt, carrying her husband’s abandoned debt and still trying to provide for his children, whom, of course, he left behind. A pity, therefore, that the local nob she used to visit every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for a bit of light relief did not entertain an emulation of her husband’s life change. There are limits to alliances, after all.

And then there’s Sonia. Sonia has seen it all. She is living off the state. She is on the take, depending on your perspective. She is on family credit, the dole, the social, whatever. Natalie happens to splash her one day as she drives past on what petrol is left in the tank of the car her husband used to fund, just before the credit people appear to repossess it. Sonia has analysis. She knows things. She can spot a person up to this, or doing that at a distance. Whether an antique dealer, a respected farmer, a man with a computer business, of even a man who drives an Audi with an eye for a floosie young thing flashing her thigh, she picks up the vibes, registers them, keeps them on file. She knows the ropes, and can spot where they have been tied. She feels she has been hung by each and every one of them several times. 

She’s on the social and knows how to cook from tins. She runs the kind of household where she would experience surprise if introduced to the contents of her refrigerator. She’s also a cynic, a closet psychopath with axes to grind. If The Heart Of The Country had continued to explore these local, colourful and humorous rivalries, then the book would have been ultimately stronger.

Unfortunately, Fay Weldon moves into other, broader, bigger issues, and has her local people voice their significance. She delves into agribusiness, diet and supermarkets. She examines economic and professional, rather than merely social integrity. She stops short of macrobiotic diets, but only just.

Eventually, the book becomes something of a mishmash of ideas it could easily and profitably ignored. Its original thrust of human beings being as complicated as human beings are in order to create, effect and endure consequences would have been much more powerful.

View this book on amazon The Heart of the Country