Harriet Waugh
Fay Weldon's The Shrapnel Academy (Hodder & Stoughton), a dark comedy of warfare between revolutionary servants below stairs and their psychopathic betters above, is a breakaway from her now familiar lament of woman wronged. It is not that women are not wronged, but the voice of the novel is all of a piece chillingly ironic — whilst the comedy is funny, the surreal element is grounded in the action and the action itself is genuinely exciting. It is the best crafted novel of the year.
The other two novels that have given me the greatest pleasure are both historical. Augustus by Allan Massie (Bodley Head) follows the fortunes of Caesar Augustus from his own point of view. The novel has all the drama of Graves's I Claudius with an added mordant humour. Mr Massie gives Augustus a chilly depth.
Piers Paul Read's The Free Frenchman while chronicling the fortunes of two gen- erations of a minor French aristocratic family explains France's behaviour during the second world war. The novel succeeds triumphantly in charting the rise of the French Communist Party, the ambivalent behaviour of the Roman Catholic Church, the gradual moral corruption of the Vichy Government, the reasons for the unpopu- larity of de Gaulle and the Gaullists' unhappy experience of England within the frame-work of a rattling good story. It could not be bettered.
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