Fay Weldon
Novels

Fay Weldon's newest novel is an uproariously funny and subversively serious evocation of that ever enticing pipe-dream: If I ran the world, this is how it would be.

Why not introduce a few radical notions to a world reeling from the effects of conventional leadership? Extreme inflation is challenging the meaning of money; religious fervor is obscuring the language of God and the Devil; the education and health systems are in shambles; men and women vie in a free-for-all for survival. For years, Fay Weldon boldly, irreverently, ahs shone her flashlight on the threadbare morals of modern life. In Darcy's Utopia, she creates a woman determined to rip apart the old order and start fresh.

Of marginal genealogy (but then Maggie Thatcher is a grocer's daughter), and with looks that play better than they should, Eleanor Darcy ends up married to a formidable university chancellor, the economist to whom the Prime Minister listens. And Eleanor is the serpent, or angel, who whispers utopian visions in Julian Darcy's ear.

We meet Eleanor when her husband is in jail for imperiling the financial structure of the nation. Tow journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valerie Jones, have been promised exclusive interviews with her - though they seem more preoccupied with each other than with their elusive subject. Holing up in a Holiday Inn, Valerie and Hugo venture from their love nest only to interview Eleanor. Hugo is looking for truth and pragmatism in Eleanor's vision; Valerie is in quest of the woman's angle.

As Eleanor Darcy emerges, so does her remarkable vision - complete with shockingly sensible ideas about child-rearing, abortion, education, integration, fundamentalism, economics - and, of course, a new twist on that old story of the sexes.

Bio from the book jacket:

Fay Weldon was raised in a household of women in New Zealand, and produced four sons of her own, as if to balance the gender count. After taking degrees in economics and psychology from the University of Edinburgh, she survived a decade of odd jobs and hard times, then began writing film and television scripts and fiction. Among her fifteen novels and short-story collections are The Cloning of Joanna May, The Hearts and Lives of Men, The Shrapnel Academy, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Leader of the Band, Puffball, and The Heart of the Country, winner of the 1989 Los Angeles Times Fiction Award.