A congregation of women

Tom Shone

LIFE FORCE by Fay Weldon HarperCollins, £14.99, pp.200 In the middle of one of her characteristi- cally bumptious bear-hugs with the reader

in her new novel, Fay Weldon suddenly pauses to examine who it is exactly that she has embraced: a female character is described as feeling

• • • as you would, reader (should you be female, which I can't take for granted) . .. Can't she? Surely it's a well established if disheartening fact that gender drives an

unassailable wall through the nation's read- ing habits?

As one of the characters in Alice

Thomas Ellis's recent novel, Pillars of Gold, Opined:

I can't read books by men ... They will go on about their willies and chopping blondes to bits and who cares?

The dig at her brat-pack namesake aside, Ellis nevertheless displayed signs of want-

ing some of the action herself and con- trived to suggest that one of her own

female characters had been chopped up and dumped in Camden lock. Our senior women novelists are evidently unhappy with their reputation for exclu- sively female readerships And so, like Honda-riding clew, they've set about giving themselves a bit of a turbo boost. Anita Brookner's new novel this autumn opens with a hard slug at police procedure, While the new Weldon contains a rather nasty bathroom electrocution and goes on

repeatedly about the size of its male lead's don., 5 --- 10 inches, as we are reminded

half a dozen times throughout the book.

But then Weldon's own path through modern sexual mores has always been a rather idiosyncratic zigzag. Size matters but so too does keeping abreast of more pro- gressive attitudes, which means giving the thumbs up on the pages of the Guardian to all the latest sexy scandals like Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Nicholson Baker's Vox. This desire to keep up with the boys has now filtered down to her fiction.

Life Force sets out to document the Byzantine sexual history of one Leslie Beck, well-endowed, middle-aged roué, London property developer and 'a kind of devil man'. It is a history which takes her back and forth in time and in and out of many women: two wives — Jocelyn and Anita — a spinster art-gallery owner, Marion, a fat bored housewife, Rosalie, and an assistant cleric in the local estate agency, Nora, who also narrates the book.

It resembles every other Weldon novel in almost every respect — a picaresque plot that has several women dancing around a single devilish man, a bit of nudity (always 'unabashed), some whimsical paragraph breaks, some breathless exclamation marks, and, above all, Weldon's Momsy chats with the reader.

There are also, however, some interest- ing innovations, most notably Weldon's evi- dent desire to shoehorn into her novel all the latest phrases of the month. Having gone on about hormone replacement ther- apy in one of her typically rambling digres- sions, she concludes, with spectacular inelegance, 'What a bummer!' Later she tries to butch it out by exhausting all the possible terms for penis — 'cock, or don& or dick, or willy'. While at another point, attempting to describe Marion's virginal dreams, she has recourse to 'what I believe is called the feeling tone . . .' The phrase is Martin Amis's, but Weldon proudly unveils her own equally ersatz version: 'may the Life Force be with you'. Which, it must be said, as well as being 15 years out of date, simply doesn't cut the mustard. Life Force, both novel and loopy catchphrase, elicits the same embarrassed response in the reader that he/she would have to a disco- dancing grandmother.

Another innovation is the extent to which this 'Life Force', which flows through all her characters, relegating them to tit- part players in the Life Force Drama', has finally obliterated any need for distinguish- ing between these hapless conduits. Leslie Beck, the one with that penis, he's easy to identify, but the rest are all interchange- able, or if they are not, then only by virtue of the symbolic sandwich boards with which they have been issued declaring their exact position in the sexual battlefield. For exam- ple, while Beck erects buildings, Nora, the estate agent beached by middle age and fighting the others for his affection, finds that in the recession there are more build- ings than there are buyers. Eliminating even a decent time-lag for the readers to work the message out for themselves, Weldon has Beck seduce Nora on a build- ing site.

That most of the book is narrated by an estate agent is quite appropriate, for Weldon's method of characterisation reads like an estate agent's blurb; it is issued, fait accompli, before we view the property. There is Rosalie, 'plump, fleshy, noisy, emotional, sensual and animated'. Or per- haps you'd prefer 'cool, critical, earnest, neat, humourless' Susan? Sounds promis- ing? Well, for the most part we have to take these descriptions on trust because Weldon never descends to describing actions by which these qualities are illus- trated. She simply tells us what they are and hopes the reader's memory is up to it. Her customary habit of referring to her characters by their full names every time they speak or enter the room has never come in handier.

In fact, so dire is the characterisation in Life Force that she's been forced to make another innovation: complete personal his- tories every time they speak or enter the room. Thus:

if you remember, am Nora, married to Ed the publisher . . . Rosalie is the one who's gone to fat and seed ...

and so on. Done just once you might think it was a joke, but the problem never seems to resolve itself and even on page 75 she's still at it with the I, Nora's and if you remember's.

Occasionally the characters struggle free of this enumerative tangle and we get a sliver of meaningful detail. Rosalie, you remember, the one who's gone to fat and seed, removes her bra for Beck and notices its off-white colour from having been repeatedly washed with her husband's blue shirts — an economical way of signifying all that she is leaving behind while simultane- ously suggesting her guilt at doing so.

But Weldon, you know, the one who's far too interested in herself to spend much time on her characters, is much keener on delivering those little homiletic gems for which she's so loved:

Female reader, I warn you, do not take into your home as your friend the kind of woman who hates her mother and loves her father . . . Male reader, reverse the sexes of the above.