Overkill including the dog
Anita Brookner
THE SHRAPNEL ACADEMY by Fay Weldon
Hodder & Stoughton, f8.95
The Shrapnel Academy is a fable ex- trapolated from earlier and more stinging reports on warfare — invariably of a domestic nature — by a combative writer refreshed by a global indignation. The voice of the militant and politicised femin- ist is heard in this account of insurrection in a military academy on the eve of the Wellington Lecture, a prestigious annual event which brings a collection of shabby notables to a country house which is then cut off by a blizzard. Since refugees from the Third World make up the staff, and since they too are varyingly politicised, it is Only a matter of time before the revolution declares itself. That it declares itself by inadvertence is part of Mrs Weldon's plan. She is out to clobber everyone. The body count in this novel — referred to in military parlance as the Lethality Index — is high, largely because Mrs Weldon insists on recounting great battles of the past, lingering with particular relish on the Retreat from Moscow. Others pass this way: Alexander, Charlemagne, Gusta- vus Adolphus, and the more modest be- cause unparticularised or unpatronised events which lead inexorably to the testing of the first atom bomb, and the ultimate refinement of weapons conceived since 1945. The ostensible story is threadbare. Several largely undifferentiated people with peculiar names — Mew, Baf, Muffin, Panza, Sergei — are brought together for a weekend. The weekend device is com- pounded by the country-house device, the dinner-party device, and the snowstorm device. This chic academy, founded to Perpetuate the name of Henry Shrapnel, inventor of the exploding cannon ball, is staffed by non-Europeans, mobilised by the butler, Acorn, into a fighting force, which in the event does not fight. It is the paranoid military guests who panic, devise a military strategy, fail to grasp the salient fact that a door opens inward instead of outward, and attack, using the miniatu- rised weapons that a hardware salesman happens to have handy. They blow them- selves up, and the life force, in the form of Nature, reclaims the Shrapnel Academy in the cause of peace and love. Nature, of course, contains neither peace nor love, but it is perhaps inevitable that a novel on the theme of the folly of man should end with an invocation to a quantity generally held to be female. Even God is mentioned in the last paragraph, though He is not claimed for either side. The effect is not in the least consoling, nor is it meant to be.
Mrs Weldon's interpolations are well known to her devoted readers, of whom the present reviewer is one, as is the length of her paragraphs, swelled to almost normal size by the weight of the concerns they carry. And not only weight but volume: 58,000 dead here, four million there, mutilations, explosions, incinera- tions. She addresses the reader briskly and enjoins patience and forbearance: she is aware that she is not telling a funny story and that the raids on the past are heavy going. The idea that this might be a moral tale has, alas, to be laid aside, for it can be fairly assumed that right-thinking people are not in favour of war and wrong- thinking people do not on the whole read novels. In any event, this is so very nearly not a fiction at all. Traditional narrative, of which Mrs Weldon has never been a proponent, is abandoned for tables of military strategy, and if this is a metaphor it does not go far enough. Compared with the base in-fighting of the previous novels, in which every blow is delivered right on target and usually below the belt, the effect is oddly pallid. The killing and eating of a dog does not improve matters. More in this case is less.
This writer has made her name, and it is a name which will remain in the annals of 20th-century fiction, from an examination of war between the sexes, or rather be- tween the sex, for it is women who engage her attention, and the rivalries, the mis- ogyny, of women engaged in the same quest, that draw the well-tempered acid from her pen. Her sub-text has always been the futility of men, in comparison with whom women are naturally more interesting if no more admirable. She is particularly good on the way that women fail their own tests, are not strong enough, clever enough, wicked enough, or just lucky enough to defeat all the others. This universal context is played down in The Shrapnel Academy and the novel suffers accordingly: indeed, it seems to have changed into a self-congratulatory diatribe against the common enemy, the war- mongers, the inventors of deadly weapons, and all conceivable means of destruction. Where there is too much indignation the satire vanishes. The women here, in the absence of the meanest of motives, fail to make their mark, and the men cannot expand to fill the gap. She is a healthy writer. No one could doubt that her heart is in the right place, although she is conspicuously unkind to those who cherish their fantasies. Women read her to find out how awful they are. By great good fortune Pavanne have just re-issued Female Friends, one of her best. It impresses as a very nearly moral tale, because it is not self-serving, and because its generous indignation is personal and not representative of a conscience-stricken majority. The female friends of the title are rueful as well as fallible, and Mrs Weldon deals with them compassionately. She also deals with them in beautifully clean sent- ences, the best of which have the ring of aphorisms: 'She is used to being admired, and only her looks are admirable.' She has been compared to Ivy Compton-Burnett but she is not so cold, nor so destructive. Destruction in fact is not her game. The Shrapnel Academy deals too much with destruction. Oddly enough, it is her least generous work.
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