Upping the case
Tom Utley
A HARD TIME TO BE A FATHER by Fay Weldon Flamingo, £12.99, pp. 262 These 19 short stories are well written and beautifully constructed, and most have interesting and unusual plots to keep the pages turning. There are some cynical jokes in them and a few flashes of insight into human nature, but I am not sure that I fully understand the point of any of them. (A statement about me, I know, but also about Fay Weldon.) Many may say that a short story need have no special point beyond being inter- esting, amusing and well written. I would say amen to that except that Miss Weldon writes in such a clever-clever way as to sug- gest that she does have a very profound point to make. The trouble is that she never spells out quite what it is.
I could not work out whether the stories were meant to be read as a collection, or left in the spare bedroom for guests to dip into, one story per stay. They have themes in common: betrayal, infidelity and the emotional damage, identified succinctly by Larkin, that your mum and dad can do to you. Several of the stories are about jeal- ousy and revenge. In one, a daughter disap- proves of her homosexual father's new bisexual boyfriend and so seduces the boyfriend and accuses him of rape. In another, a young woman art critic, jealous of the talent and domestic happiness of a woman artist, seduces this nice woman's husband and lets her know what she has done. The nice woman promptly kills her- self and the art critic doesn't really care. In a third, an ex-wife drops in on her succes- sor to tell her that the husband whom she stole is having it off with the au pair.
These stories are all a bit samey — and, I suppose, deliberately so. But why tell roughly the same story four or five times in the course of the collection? Is there a more profound moral to them, taken together, than the obvious: don't get on the wrong side of a clever, vindictive woman? Search me.
Talking about sameness, two stories in the book have identical plots, about women taking fertility treatment. Three apparently unrelated stories have characters called Harry in them, two have Trixies (one a nickname, the other a real name), two have Wendys and three, if I remember rightly, a psychoanalyst called Miss Jacobs. Sprained or broken ankles keep cropping up in sto- ries that seem otherwise to have nothing to do with each other, and gardens in two sep- arate stories are described as containing hollyhocks and delphiniums. It is hard to believe that a writer of Miss Weldon's imaginative power uses the same names for different characters and plants the same flowers in different gardens simply because she is too lazy to dream up new ones. She is obviously trying to tell us something about Harrys, ankles and delphiniums. But what?
My advice to all except those who are clever enough to understand the working of Miss Weldon's mind is to read the sto- ries one at a time, over a period of several months. That way, readers will not become as irritated as I did by the way in which all the characters — female and male, young and old, English and Norwegian — speak with the same voice: the voice of an articu- late, self-conscious, middle-class woman. As I read on, I kept hoping that the last story, the one that lends its title to the whole collection, would explain everything that Miss Weldon was trying to say. It turned out to be a funny account, not very far-fetched, of an evening in the casualty department of a busy hospital, where the computer crashes and the patients are kept waiting for ages.
Not content simply to tell her funny story, Miss Weldon adopts the infuriating quirk of rendering random words and phrases in capital letters:
The bullet-proof glass doors that admitted walk-ins to casualty were bolted shut against VIOLENT MARAUDERS. Two SECURI- TY GUARDS flanked the entrance. Candide was checked over for suitability for treatment out of PUBLIC FUNDS. The security guards took their TIME . . .
A charitable reader might think that something had gone wrong at the printers. But after 21 pages of this tiresome exhibi- tion Miss Weldon makes the mistake of explaining what she is up to. And a JOLLY SILLY explanation it TURNS OUT TO BE. She wants us to imagine that we are read- ing her story on CD-Rom and that we can click with our mouse on the upper-case words so as to call up cross-references and create our own multiple-choice novels. But since we are reading it on the page rather than on screen, she says, words in UPPER CASE can merely indicate your author's pattern of interest, and thus, perhaps, enrich the tale.
Well, really.
`Reading, of course,' says Miss Weldon, `is almost as complex a matter as writing.' No, it is not — or at least it need not be, if the writer is any good. What is so sad is that Miss Weldon is such a good writer and storyteller that she has no need to try to lend her work weight by making her mean- ing deliberately obscure. So why does she do it?
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