Donald Clarke catches up with controversial novelist Fay Weldon in Monaghan, where her novel Puffball is being filmed
Fay Weldon has a reputation as a bit of a wind-up merchant. Never comfortable being part of a gang, the spiky English writer, now 74, appears to actively enjoy outraging all those post-feminists, neo-socialists and professional do-gooders who assume she must be on their side. In 2001 she published a novel, The Bulgari Connection, sponsored by the diamond manufacturer whose name appears in the title. A year later she moved into London's Savoy Hotel as the writer-in-residence for that posh establishment.
Listening to her on the radio giggling bemusedly at the aghast response of outraged liberals, one couldn't help but think that she had taken both gigs purely to antagonise. "I'd prefer a funny fascist to a serious socialist," she later told the Guardian. Fay surely isn't going to claim she doesn't enjoy stirring it up a bit.
"Oh no. I never pick fights with anybody," she tells me, making a sweet face. "These fights just, well, emerge. I say things that are observably true and people then begin protesting for reasons I can't possibly imagine."
We are sitting on the bottom floor of a double-decker bus parked in a retail estate just outside Monaghan town. Fay has turned up to have a glance at the shooting of the film version of her comic novel, Puffball. The picture is directed by Nicolas Roeg, the near-legendary progenitor of such classics as Don't Look Now and Walkabout, and is written and co-produced by the author's son, Dan Weldon.
It soon becomes clear that Dan - hairier than his mum, but with the same round, friendly face - is well used to managing her indiscretions. At various points during our chat - when she begins making unkind remarks about publishers or potentially libellous ones about film stars - he points to my notebook and imploringly sing-songs: "Mum, please!" Notwithstanding these exchanges, the two seem to be awfully good chums. But there must surely have been tensions during the lengthy development of Puffball. Fay, the author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Big Women, wrote the novel back in 1980, and her son has been trying to get a film version off the ground for the past decade.
A blackly comic amalgam of gothic melodrama and feminist fable, Puffball follows a smug, urban woman as she settles into a cottage in Somerset to have a baby. Her grim neighbours rapidly take offence and devise sinister schemes to take control of the interloper. (Incidentally, the publishers should be executed for plastering a pathetic, chick-lit-friendly cover on the current paperback.)
In the book, the West Country location emerges as a character in itself. Glastonbury Tor - one of several swellings that mirror the protagonist's pregnancy - is consistently noted looming over the weird events. So did Fay fly into a rage when Dan revealed that, thanks to generous funding from the Irish Film Board and the Northern Irish Film and Television Commission, the action was being moved to our own Border counties?
"No. Well it's very much the same here as the West Country: myths and standing stones," she says. "What's the difference? It is all to do with the city coming to the country. In a way, it's much better here. The West Country is so built up now. You have to come somewhere like here to get away from it all."
Dan goes on to explain that they had originally toyed with the idea of moving the action two counties along to Cornwall. This makes a kind of sense. One immediately thinks of Susan George and Dustin Hoffman meeting similarly unfriendly locals in that part of the world in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. "Ah, but you couldn't do Straw Dogs now," Fay says. "Everybody in Cornwall has broadband now."
Mother and son originally embarked on the project as co-writers, but Fay, believing her talents were better suited to fiction and television drama, soon "backed off", as she says. Dan was not to be dissuaded. Repeatedly spurned by financiers who couldn't understand exactly what genre the script was striving for, he was eventually forced to mortgage his house to keep the project alive.
With a talent like Roeg on board and with a cast including such impressive actors as Miranda Richardson, Kelly Reilly and Donald Sutherland, Puffball has every chance of emerging as a fine film. But one can understand why potential investors might be puzzled as to what this strange entity hoped to become.
"Well, it is about envy between women and that remains pretty much the same forever," Fay chuckles. "It is about pregnant woman and women who aren't pregnant. You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. You are always conscious when you are pregnant of the hostility of other women. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people."
THIS IS THE sort of perkily delivered, unsisterly rant that has so often gotten her in trouble with contemporaries in the women's movement. So much else about her fits the feminist mould nicely. Born in Worcester, though raised in New Zealand, Weldon, whose mother and grandfather both wrote novels, had a pretty ghastly time with men in her early years. In 1957, already the mother of one child, she married a head teacher from Acton named Ronald Bateman. Bateman, whose respectability was barely skin deep, refused to have sex with her and instead encouraged her to pick up men in strip clubs and tell him all about the grisly nocturnal aftermaths. After just one such transaction, Fay, who is still so traumatised that she reverts to the third person when detailing the events in her autobiography, packed her bags and left.
Puffball puts the women back in charge. Here we have strong female characters - sometimes with menacing intent, admittedly - taking control of their surroundings. Was the writing an act of revenge? "No. I never was doing that," she says. "I write about women. We have a hard time from men, but I think we give men a pretty hard time, too. You know, you just get dubbed a feminist writer. I suppose I am looking at women from a woman's point of view. But none of these women in the book are victims."
WELDON ESCAPED THE awful liaison with Bateman to forge a successful career as an advertising copywriter. Disappointingly, she now maintains that the oft-related story that she devised the slogan "Go to work on an egg" is not quite true. "It's a long and boring story and no one has the patience for it - not even me," she said recently.
Sometime after embarking on a considerably more stable marriage to Ron Weldon, an antiques dealer (and Dan's dad), Fay began to develop her talents as a writer. Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967. Other books include Praxis (1978) and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989). Much work for television followed, including, famously, the first ever episode of Upstairs, Downstairs.
Given how often her early stories dealt with men being wretched to women, it is hardly surprising that she was taken up as an icon of the feminist movement. Yet, just listen to her mouth off about the jealousy between pregnant women. This seems a little disloyal to the clan.
"Oh yes, but women were all like that before feminism. Then feminism came along and we all became sisters, which was really great," she says with an ironic trill. "Now it is going back the other way. The idea of sisterhood is vanishing, particularly if you are in the city. There is this awful competitiveness now. They are all looking for promotion and to do down the next person." She pokes slightly sadly at the spaghetti and meatballs that have just arrived.
"I don't think that it's the women's fault. That is just the way the bosses organise it. Once upon a time, when you were working women you felt you were all together against the boss. Now it's harder, because it is all divide and rule. Your manager works harder than you do and is even more pale and wan. You no longer know who the enemy is."
Weldon's pronouncements read a little like rants, but they are delivered in an agreeably mischievous tone, punctuated with cheeky laughter. I get the impression that she is good fun to be around.
Still, Dan does have his work cut out guiding her away from legal infelicities. When I bring up Susan Seidelman's ill-fated 1989 film version of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil - called simply She-Devil - she quickly eases into a gently irritated rhythm.
"That was a very odd beast. They simply didn't understand it at all. Susan Seidelman discovered she was seven months pregnant halfway through, which was a problem. Then Rosanne Barr refused to go on a diet and then she . . . " I think we had better not print the next bit.
Dan, his brow furrowing as he speculates upon the potential avariciousness of Barr's legal team, gestures one more time towards my tape recorder.
"Oh Mum!"
• Puffball is scheduled for release later this year