Fay Weldon, bringing society to book

14/01/2009

My interview with Fay Weldon comes straight after a very intense few hours watching a DVD of ‘The Cloning of Joanna May’ – which is being released this month – and reading the original book. It was an illuminating experience – not least because the book (1989) and the TV film (made in 1991) are so different.

 

The film focuses on the unhealthy obsession of a divorced man for his wife, which leads him to clone her – in an unsuccessful attempt to get one of the clones into his bed. The book, however, is much more layered than that, and its dissections of the four 30-year-old versions of the older Joanna May are a brilliant exposition of how much ‘nurture’ – our upbringing and life experiences – can impact upon our ‘nature’ – what we are born with. Just how much is the child ‘father to the man’? There is plenty in there to keep a psychotherapist busy too, with sub-themes echoing Oedipal and Electra complexes.

 

The book is also more literary than the film. There are echoes of Greek tragedy in there, with man trying to outdo the gods by creating life, and suffering the inevitable hubris; while science – his means of acting as ‘God’ and also threatening the world – fittingly brings about his death.

 

And, we agree in our talk, there are references in there to classic science fiction, a medium which Fay says she loves reading, including the ‘monsters’ created in HG Wells’ Dr Moreau and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “Dr Frankenstein can create a life form, but it does not have to obey him,” she agrees. It is a riveting read, and while the film is excellent too, it’s quite different.

 

 So how does she feel about TV and films being made from her books?  “I’m very grateful!” she smiles. “A book has its own existence, and so does a film. They’re connecting with another audience. I’ve written a lot for television, so I understand the difficulties of adapting. It’s much easier the other way around – writing a book from a film means you are adding, rather than extracting and carving.

 

“I think I was offered the chance to do the script for ‘Joanna May’ 
but I turned it down. I’d written the story once – I might have been 
tempted to change it!”

 

The ‘Joanna May’ film, starring two superb British actors in Patricia Hodge and Brian Cox, was directed by the same person as Fay’s biggest TV drama, ‘Life and Loves of a She Devil’ and that too has at its dark heart portrayals of the attritional, destructive way in which relationships can break down: there can be a very thin divide between love and hate, just as there is between our pleasure and pain receptors.

 

So is her vision of life really so bleak? “No, not at all,” she says. “We can all have a good time. It’s just that awful things do happen to people. We’re not always going to be happy. It’s not in our nature. It’s probably just that the prevailing approach is that we are simply the products of our environment. If anything goes wrong, we can go into therapy and blame it on our upbringing.”

 

“Do I believe in original sin? Of course I do. Everybody can’t be good. We’re all born different. We’re all creatures of Darwinian creation.” In other words, some of us are born with very different potentials –  and we can play that hand of cards how we choose. Which is not a million miles away from the parable of the talents.

 

And on which subject, Fay actually joined the Church of England in 2000 and was confirmed in St Paul’s. Was there an epiphany for her? “No, it was much more gradual than that and not too heavy. I like going to church, and I just love singing hymns. The words are just so nice and they stick with you for life. I’ve no expectation that I’m booking a ticket to anywhere!”

 

That love of words is something you’d expect from a master wordsmith whose work reveals a real appreciation of the multi-layered responses  that certain words can evoke. But that appreciation, she says, is in danger of dying out as younger generations just don’t read as much as their elders. “Because we have read more, words have more resonance. Now books are written on computers, not by hand, they get corrected along the way.  They’re more literal. Sentences need to reach conclusions. Younger  people don’t read the same way.”

 

It’s hard, we agree, to imagine someone today constructing a mighty  sentence or paragraph as Dickens did – confident that the reader would stay with the author as he builds a complex construct that has an integrity and a life all of its own.

 

Of all people, she should know, as she teaches creative writing at Brunel University, and recognises that while she enjoys watching the flowering of young talent, there is sometimes no past to draw on. And while information has never been easier to obtain, it isn’t the same thing as knowledge.

 

One regular theme in her work is the rottenness at the heart of big business. And as we speak she is aghast at the goings on in the US,  where - following on from the collapse of the banking system – news  comes that tens of billions of dollars more have been defrauded. “I’m very fearful of the current situation. How will people get by if the financial systems collapse? We can’t all grow our own vegetables!

 

“I really feel as if we are at some sort of tipping point – the death throes of the old order. But what will replace it?”

 

But even in the crumbling of the global economy she sees inspiration for fiction. “It takes a while for events to really sink into the consciousness – we’re still taking in 9/11. But all the things you see and hear go in there – and come out in a writer’s work later on.”

 

The Cloning of Joanna May was written several years after Chernobyl had just happened – throwing the world into a paroxysm of fear that, at any moment, the nuclear energy we rely on to power our homes and factories could destroy the planet: looking back, this was a defining moment when it was suddenly appreciated that a disaster in one country could spark contagion throughout the world.

 

For ‘nuclear power’ in 1986, read ‘financial systems’ in 2008.  Perhaps this is the point at which Fay Weldon is inspired to write her next novel!