Books
Big Sister
by Stephanie Johnson
If all the big stories have been told – if the sexes have finished battling it out, if white guilt has been milked for all it’s worth, if rags-to-riches tales are more morally expounded the other way around – then perhaps blurring the genres is all we’re left with. Our screens feed us a nauseating diet of docu-dramas, drama-mentaries and even – wait for it – irritainment, which may be defined as entertainment so irritating it galvanises the viewer. More and more books are being published where the authorial stance is a self-consciously clever shifting of the ground beneath the reader’s feet, a kind of adult version of the four-year-old’s realisation of the power of the lie. Where will it all end?
We have a way to go yet. Fay Weldon’s latest offering brings us, just when you thought you’d understood that memoirs and autobio-graphies give you the truth only as far as the writer will allow it, the reality novel. It presents conventionally enough, introducing us in the short first chapter to Trisha, a middle-aged lottery winner who has been profligate with her prize-money. The first intervention from the author comes early, with the second chapter headed “Writer’s Note”, setting up the convention Weldon uses for the rest of the book. In alternate chapters, Trisha takes a slum flat and works part-time for her landlady, who operates downstairs a laundromat and mending service. Soon after, Trisha meets Peter Watson on the stairs, he coming up as she goes down, and as they pass a transference of souls takes place.
“Novels alone are not enough,” Weldon tells us, “Self-revelation is required … Best put your faith in the new reality novel … the reality novel threads the life through the fiction.” The leaping of souls is a metaphor for the “crossover between the novelist’s actual life and the alternative reality presented by the novelist”.
Weldon seems to accept that the reality novel is about as intellectually challenging as its television cousin, and introduces each new character’s name in bold. She also reminds us of the state of play each time we return to the fictional story, just in case we’ve forgotten. The danger perhaps is not so much that the simple story will have slipped the reader’s mind, more that s/he will skim those parts. The metaphysical dilemma of Trisha, Peter and his partner Doralee is amusing and compelling, but Weldon’s lively and generous account of her own life makes far more interesting reading. There is also more of it than there is of the fiction. Midway, Weldon remarks, “Notice how the story of Trisha, Doralee and Peter is slowing up?”
Weldon shows us her 14-year-old self weeping as she leaves her never-to-be-seen-again father on the Wellington quayside, introduces us to her poetry-loving and eccentric mother who could quote pages of Tennyson even at the age of 95, and to her beloved sister Jane who died young of cancer. The men in her life, particularly Ron Weldon, her husband of over 30 years, are treated mischievously but affectionately. The marriage, it seems, was often troubled. Like many men, then and now, Ron disliked his wife’s success and public personae, but was unable to articulate this. As is widely known, he left Fay on the urging of his therapist. On the day their divorce came through, in 1994, Ron died. This seems so much like an event in a classic Weldon novel that the reader could be forgiven for wondering if this fact is manipulated.
Late in the book, her memoir Auto da Fay rates a fairly casual mention. Mantrapped, we are informed, is the second volume. If it has a weakness it is that the reader must come to it with an affection for Weldon’s work already in place. Unlike even the worst of reality TV, it is not “stand alone” – it is richly connected to a substantial oeuvre of novels, short stories, plays and television drama.
MANTRAPPED, by Fay Weldon (Fouth Estate, $34.99).
