Fay Weldon's Desert Island Books

Talking about books is one of life’s great pleasures. So occasionally, is destroying one. Back in 1982 I wrote a book called Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen. It was a book about reading and writing, and is still in print. It is even on the sixth form syllabus of the New South Wales Education Board and an enraged student, male, 17 or so, burned it on YouTube the other year.

I had every sympathy with him. It’s just not a book likely to engage young Australian males, and a book should be able to give rise to strong opinions. It did however have a list at the back of novels which I thought any well-educated young reader should be able to talk about, and I stand by it. But times move on: here are a few more up-to-date recommendations.

Three dystopias: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are well-enough known, but I will add another: C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength which, like 1984, was written in 1948. The three together give a pretty good account of today’s world: its dependency on anti-depressants, the presence of the thought police, and in the Lewis the rule of the acronym in modern oppression: totalitarianism is imposed procedurally by an ostensibly apolitical NGO called the N.I.C.E. The second half of this book is less convincing (he could not write women), but the first half is pretty remarkable. My own recent dystopia, Chalcot Crescent, I cannot resist pointing out, is at least alleviated with jokes.
 
Julian Clary’s Briefs Encountered is one of the most cheerful, most imaginative, most intelligent and most touching novels I have read for ages. A ghostly Noel Coward lives in the house next door, scandals and agonies and all, in parallel with Julian Clary himself. You laugh, you cry with both of them, and adore Julian’s literary skill and inventiveness.

I’ve been reading Edith Wharton’s short stories. I’ve long read and loved the novels, but hadn’t come across these until recently. They are strong, dramatic and alive: not in the least wispy, as are so many contemporary short stories. It may be that they include death as a factor as important as life, written in an age when the living wore mourning for so much of their lives. They seem to me to be a kind of precursor of Scott Fitzgerald’s stories: the power, the pathos and the truth.

I’ve just been on a literary platform at Dartington with the excellent and amiable Richard Davenport Hines. He’s just had his book Titanic Lives published: the most readable, informative and compassionate book about that otherwise obsessively iconised disaster. We were coupled together to talk about ‘class’, since I have a new novel out, Habits of the House, which is a love story set in Belgrave Square in 1899. The truly posh feature greatly in it, not that they can help the accident of birth any more than the servants can. I think it is the sheer unfairness of our beginnings that so obsesses us as readers and viewers. We scorn the rich while being unwilling to give all we have to the poor.

Love and Mr Lewisham, a rather obscure novel by H.G. Wells, is well worth reading. It’s the first thing he wrote (in the 1880s), and stayed unpublished for 25 years. It’s a young man’s novel, about the dashing of hope: the youth who like Hardy’s Jude dreams of greatness, and is brought back to earth by grim reality. If I seem pre-occupied with fin de siècle literature it is because I am, inevitably, at the moment since Habits of the House has become a trilogy.  My next titled heroine, orphaned and fallen on hard times, becomes involved with a charlatan medium as does young Mr Lewisham. But there we are: love in all ages and in all classes has its pains as well as its pleasures. I’ve also been reading my grandfather Edgar Jepson’s 1904 novel, The Garden at No 19, recently re-published.

To balance things out let me take you centuries into the future with Philip K. Dick’s Clans of the Alphane Moon. Dick is the great sci-fi prophet of our times; he died poor but after his death came into great wealth as his stories became films: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall and so on – but this novella is the one for readers who don’t usually go for science fiction: a diverting account of how a planet, populated by inhabitants of an abandoned insane asylum, develops into a relatively well-organised, functioning and cheerful society. So there is hope for us yet...

Habits of the House by Fay Weldon is published by Head of Zeus, £14.99 hardback.