Everyone knows that Fay Weldon was one of the team behind the advertising slogan “Go to work on an egg”, but perhaps fewer remember that she also wrote the first episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, back in 1971. It was the same year that she published her second novel, Down Among the Women, and had fate dealt her a different hand she might perhaps have spent more time with Mrs Bridges than she did writing her subsequent, and numerous, novels. But she ended up only lasting for a few episodes because, as she told an interviewer at the ICA in 1984, her work resulted in something of a cast mutiny. The actors, she remembered, “would only utter lines which made them appear nice people”.
That kind of misguided subordination would enrage most novelists, but Weldon in particular has little truck with “nice” characters. In her most famous novel, The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983), pretty much everyone is horrid: Bobbo, the philandering accountant and emblem of entitlement; Mary Fisher, his romantic novelist mistress, in spite of her winsome ways; and Ruth, the cuckolded wife who – quite literally – remodels her body in order to wreak revenge on the unsuspecting lovers. Ruth, of course, had the most reason to be horrid, but committed the further sin of child abandonment and, indeed, guinea pig murder.
The book’s close saw Ruth, the She Devil herself, installed in the phallic high tower, Mary Fisher’s residence; Mary herself is dead, and Bobbo ruined. The opening of this sequel returns us to the high tower, but in very different circumstances: transformed from a place of rustling silks and champagne seductions, it has become the HQ of Ruth’s Institute for Gender Parity, an entirely female space save for the 94-year-old Bobbo, now on the brink of death but still inclined to grab a handful of his nurse’s bum. Mary Fisher is here too, in ghostly form, and at the narrative’s centre – though stripped by age of much of her potency – is the She Devil.
A great deal has been made of the book’s transgender storyline; a convoluted subplot that eventually comes to dominate, it involves the transition of Ruth’s grandson from Tyler into Tayla, in part because he is passive and easily manipulated by others, and in part because his experiences have led him to believe that contemporary life is more easily lived as a woman. There is an implication – and sometimes more – that men are appropriating female experience and bodies in order to regain power over women, and it is not difficult to see how this has caused anger.
It is also noticeable that many of those accusing Weldon of transphobia do not apparently count blatant ageism as an assault on identity. Age is, in fact, the novel’s most significant and acutely captured aspect, not in the sense that physical and mental infirmity begin to encroach, although they do, but because of the confusion the long view can promote. The arguments that Weldon’s two novels animate and remorselessly poke away at are the often bitter arguments that feminism is having with itself, arguments that turn on vital but often intractable hierarchies of power, privilege, inclusion and experience.
Naturally drawn to provocation and highly resistant to what she perceives as the prevailing orthodoxy, Weldon is not always the most subtle of chroniclers, but neither is she particularly partisan: everyone gets it in the neck. But one ostracises or ignores her at one’s peril; if her take on the times seems confused, it’s because the times are indeed confusing, not because the passage of decades have rendered her unable to understand an era that is not her own. Don’t, as they say, shoot the messenger.
• Death of a She Devil by Fay Weldon is published by Head of Zeus (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 686. Free UK p&p, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
