The Heart of the Country

by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon, the acclaimed author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (also a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr), once again tickles the myth of the suburban countryside in this invigorating romp through marital chaos and the battle of the sexes.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Feminism, Contemporary, British Literature, Literature, Novels

Paperback

First published January 15, 1986

About the author

Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrayed contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon

Reviews

[Deborah Sheldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm beginning to suspect that Fay Weldon has only one plot: compliant, naive and traditional wife is abandoned by her philandering husband, while in the village, male characters try to seduce her and bitchy female characters pretend to be her friends. Hmm. Maybe I'll give Weldon novels a rest for a while.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a Muriel Sparkesque quality to The Heart of the Country which I've felt simmering beneath the surface of a couple of Weldon's other novels, although it isn't always fully articulated. Here, however, you have much of the same interrupted tension, the same subtext of 'let me just tell you what happens now, so that we can dig into how it happens instead.' It's a habit in Spark's novels that I just love and I think Weldon also uses it to great effect. What's interesting, however, is that while Spark usually still has a huge jolt in store for the reader (often in the form of an untimely, unexpected, and somehow unfair or just totally random death) at the moment of her 'spoilered' climax, Weldon seems to allow the tension to build up and then just sort of peter out without ever really boiling over. This isn't true in all of her novels (see Puffball, a study in climactic 'oh-my-god'ness), but I think it's definitely present here, and I do recall a similar fading out in The Spa.

If this sounds like a criticism, it isn't. Weldon's conclusions, or anti-conclusions, as the case may be, challenge our readerly desire for closure, I think—our tendency to want to see things wrapped up and tidy and settled. But sometimes, the story just ends. It isn't a pat, done-deal, and it isn't necessarily 'satisfying' in the way that maybe we want our narratives to satisfy. It's all about being in the moment with Weldon.

There was another aspect to this novel that really stuck out to me. Namely, in certain of her novels, it is difficult to separate Weldon the author from her narrators, even if her narrators seem to be rather different from her in their circumstances (convicted arsonists in psychiatric wards, for instance). And I tend to think that it becomes the hardest to differentiate between authorial commentary and narrator POV when the subject at hand is women—specifically women who are not doing better for themselves. Women who have been conned in love, taken advantage of, or haven't learned to fight their inevitably unfair circumstances tooth and nail. Weldon (and/or her characters, I suppose) just has no sympathy for these women and she allows terrible, unjust, cosmic sorts of things to happen to them as a seeming punishment for their foolishness. It can be caustic and darkly funny, and it can be rather scathing and brutal.

I'm not taking her to task for her feminism or lack thereof because firstly, plenty of others have gone down that path before me. But leaving that aside, I don't actually think she's obligated to be subtle (good thing, because she definitely isn't), and moreover, I believe that her grandiose judginess can be read with a dose of irony and satire and is also being manipulated in the service of very salient points. She wields a hell of a wrecking ball, Ms. Weldon, and god help you if you're caught within its reach.

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed the unusual narration in this book. The use of a secondary character to tell the tale of Natalie being left by her husband and being stranded in debt, with nothing to her name, added a quirky appeal to this read. I also enjoyed how the narrator would veer off into tangents, sometimes relevant, mostly not.

[Marie (UK) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a cleverly written book. Spoken in the voice of Sonia from her Pyschiatric bed it tells the story of Natalie following her husband's desertion.

[tamarvanelburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5⭐️

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upwardly mobile and occasionally unfaithful (only Tuesdays and Thursdays) housewife Natalie's husband runs off with the secretary of his failed business with the company payroll and leaves her with two children, no job skills or experience, mounting debts, and a host of rapacious "friends" and lovers who are ready to leap at the opportunities the situation provides them. Thrown into the unfamiliar and humiliating world of life on the dole, she comes to depend on Sonia, another woman impoverished by divorce and having to support her children, as one of the few people who is able and willing to give her straight advice. This is a funny, sharply characterized, intelligent, and occasionally outrageous indictment of the prevailing disdain for social welfare and the people who benefit from the system (hint: not welfare recipients). It took Fay Weldon very few pages to utterly win me over. Even though she had me sputtering in fury on the characters' behalf at times, she keeps the story light-hearted, despite the iniquity and indignities visited on the characters. The wonderfully imperfect characters are thoroughly unsentimental about getting on with life as best they can, which further highlights the lack of a level playing field between the men and women in the story. Appropriately, there isn't a grand triumph at the end, but it's not hopeless by any means. I enjoyed every word of this humorously cynical, refreshingly realistic book.

[Eva · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very nearly DNF this book. That is saying something as I rarely ever give up on a book. I had read another Fay Weldon book many years ago and reading this reminded me of my first Weldon experience. I really don't like her style of writing. It is messy and rambling but not in a good way. It was a book that was trying to be clever but unfortunately alienated the reader in the process. Not engaging and basically disappointing.

[Inga Hrund Gunnarsdóttir · Rating 3 out of 5]

SVEITASÆLA eftir Fay Weldon (kom út á íslensku 1991)
Bókin er skrifuð árið 1986 og fjallar um líf ensku húsmóðurinnar Natalíu eftir að eiginmaður hennar yfirgefur hana og skilur eftir með skuldir. Félagsmálayfirvöld vilja helst ekki hjálpa henni og hún er of föst í sínu gamla hlutverki til að berjast fyrir réttindum sínum.
Bókin er góð og öðruvísi en samt erfið, t.d. út af umfjöllunarefninu og hversu fjarlægt þetta er í tíma.
Í íslensku þýðingunni eru öll nöfn skrifuð með íslenskri stafsetningu, Bernharður, Jóna, Jana o.sfrv. Mér finnst að það eigi ekki að þýða nöfn.
Ég veit ekki hvort íslenskt félagsþjónustu umhverfi hafi verið svona á þessum tíma líka en ég vona að þetta sé orðið manneskjulegra bæði í Bretlandi og Íslandi í dag

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Fay Weldon's obituary last week, I wondered what of hers I'd read and whether, decades having passed, I'd enjoy them better than I remembered. This being the only one on my bookshelves ('Praxis' I must have given away) I read it. Not enjoyably. Initially I found the harsh, hectoring tone of it abrasive, and ultimately, although acknowledging the content might have been startling for its time, and possibly influenced many that came thereafter, it did not seem to deliver anything exceptional.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, back in about 1986 ish, there was an ITV drama of this book. It included scenes filmed at my school and I was paid £10 to be an extra. The kid playing Ben was Christian Bale. Never met him and my background scene was cut. But hey Ho 15 minutes. Or not. So when I found this book in an NT bookshop couldn’t resist. It’s not the most riveting read but evokes my Somerset teenage hood and brush with stardom.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is written beautifully, but it’s just to slow paced for me. I found that nothing really happens and it was just a bit boring. It uses complex language which is lovely to read and you can tell it’s been written by a great author but because of the language used it took me so long to read and it just dragged.

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't read Fay Weldon since the late 80's or early 90's, but picked this up in a used bookstore in London. It is wonderfully specific to Thatcher's England and yet remarkably universal. Slyly feminist and madly apolitical. A contradiction in a quick novella. In other words, I laughed and thought and enjoyed it tremendously as I had when I found her books almost 40 years ago.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

After struggling to get back into reading - as a once voracious reader - I found an outhor who brings me back to devouring a book, & I am going to look for more of her works. thank you fay, your books are dark, humorous, rousing. I started this book in my holidays by the sea in sicily.

[kp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weldon might be the only successful avowedly feminist comedic writer of the twentieth century. This one is as much a critique of Thatcherite Britain as of gender politics, but Weldon has a full quiver and can shoot at many targets at once. It's not as smooth as her best work, though.

[Liz Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Very good, very typical Fay Weldon. Lots of wry reflections on the role of women, and their reactions to a crisis, some stereotypical and others extreme.

I particularly liked the sentence: " Sonia was a good sort before she became a murderer."

[Laura]

Fay Weldon comes directly to the point she is trying to make, with no excess verbiage. Weldon at her best, for me, and I have no problem in recommending this excellent read.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a 3.5

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

For two thirds of its length, The Heart Of The Country by Fay Weldon is a brilliant, surprising, humorous, bitchy study of adopted and original rural life. Natalie, who was born with attributes of beauty and desirability, has suffered the confusion of many with her birthright. With the world available to her, she chose Harris, whose business acumen eventually matched his other skills. And so he went bust. He also ran away with that bit of fluff he used to see when...

So Natalie, bestowed Natalie, is left penniless, mortgaged up to the hilt, carrying her husband’s abandoned debt and still trying to provide for his children, whom, of course, he left behind. A pity, therefore, that the local nob she used to visit every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for a bit of light relief did not entertain an emulation of her husband’s life change.

And then there’s Sonia. Sonia has seen it all. On the state, on the take, on family credit, dole, social, whatever. Natalie happens to splash her one day as she drives past on what petrol is left in the tank of the car her husband used to fund.

Sonia has analysis. She knows things. She can spot a person up to this, or doing that at a distance. Whether an antique dealer, a respected farmer, a man with a computer business, of even a man who drives an Audi with an eye for a flousie young thing flashing her thigh, she picks up the vibes, registers them, keeps them on file. He knows the ropes. She feels she has been hung by each and every one of them several times. She’s on the social and knows how to cook from tins. She’s also a cynic, a closet psychopath with aces to grind.

If the Heart Of The Country had continued to explore these local, colourful and humorous rivalries, then the book would have been ultimately stronger. Unfortunately, Fay Weldon moves into other, broader, bigger issues, and has her local people voice their significance. She delves into aribusiness, diets, supermarkets, economic and professional, rather than merely social integrity. She stops short of macrobiotic diets, but only just.

Eventually, the book becomes something of a mish-mash of ideas it could easily and profitably ignored. Its original thrust of human beings doing as complicatedly as human beings do in order to create, effect and endure consequences would have been much more powerful.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sad story told in a funny way. It reads like a fairy tale--a cautionary tale about what happens to clueless women, which is both a critique of those women as well as a critique of a society that would say that being clueless is reason enough for people to deserve it when things go wrong. She does a lot in so few pages.

I think the narrative structure was too complicated--how is Sonia part of the story but also so omniscient? I found the sometimes-first-sometimes-third-person jarring and unnecessary to the otherwise rather tightly written story. Keep Sonia, keep the flashback format from the mental institution, do away with the shiftiness.

I think she does a good job of highlighting the various ways in which women are disadvantaged in society and how solidarity is imperfect but perhaps a way out if enough people wake up to it.

The scariest part of the book is how recognizable a lot of the rhetoric and institutional ridiculousness is--the good old boys' club, the various state bureaucracies, the social disregard and outright hostility in some cases toward women, the logic of recession (well, if I don't take this crappy job, someone else will; they couldn't sell it if it wasn't safe; poor people are poor because they're lazy).

[Baratang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fay has a way of narrating serious societal ills with so much humour that the over sensitive can continue to read to the last page, without feeling the need to abandon the book.

Call it feministic or whatever you like, but, the issues addressed or mentioned by Sonia with regards the treatment of married/divorced/separated women were real and terrifying, and definitely call for immediate change. You would agree if you were a woman or had a mother, sister, daughter or female friend you loved and cared about.

On the lighter side, I wondered what Arthur looked like and all I could imagine was some James Dean look-alike...hmmmm. Angus, poor Angus, if only he had Arthur's charm. How Harry could disappear and come back without being arrested was unreal to me. Was it also male privilege? I liked Bernard, despite having an eye for beautiful women, the boy was smart and he seemingly had a conscience.

All in all, even if the book was somehow comical, it surely raised awareness about women struggles and their inequalities to men. Something tangible must be done about this ubiquitous ill.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know yet what I think of this book. I think it will take a while to decide that, which is probably ultimately to its credit. It reads a little like a period piece, both because stylistically it's situated very much in the 1980s and because its unapologetic feminism seems shockingly past-tense.

Reading it was like reading early Atwood in that it reminds me how much the stakes have stayed the same, but the core philosophy has been diluted and contested to the extent that feminism is now expressed as a semi-disavowal ("I'm feminist, but not *that* kind") or as defiance. Here, as in some other 1980s books that took their inspiration in the 70s, it's an assumption of solidarity and a protest against the continual diminishment of women. The defiance is of patriarchal values and oppression, not of the society at large. It's difficult to express the nuance of the shift.

Glad I read it, I guess is ultimately the take-away.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Natalie is the sort of woman that other women either envy (she’s very pretty and men are attracted to her) or want to wise up because, in Natalie’s world, feminism happened to other people. Heart of the Country, by Fay Weldon, opens on the day Natalie’s husband leaves her for a younger woman. Harry left behind a bankrupt company and too many bills for unemployed Natalie to handle. Within days, her comfortable, boring life falls apart. On its own, this wasn’t enough to tempt me into reading this book. What really got me is that Heart of the Country is narrated by Sonia, one of the women who tries to wise Natalie up, and is now narrating this story from a mental institution...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

[Chas Bayfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review from 1989 contains spoilers:
An interesting book. Bitter, dry, cynical, aware. Men, obviously are evil. Her views on Christianity conflict with mine. Very interesting to see King Arthur, mystic powers and ley lines mentioned almost in the same breath as Eastenders, AIDS and GCSEs. However, as a story it was "idyllic" (ie unreal)
particularly the ending. Natalie should have burned- her husband and kids were gone and no one else cared for her. Surely Bernard and Flora were happy in squalour because of love? Then why was Bernard perfectly happy with Natalie after Flora died? Mystifying. Very easy to read.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s time to discover Fay Weldon! She is a revered and prolific writer in Great Britain. Her books are very funny, over-the-top dissections of society that border on caricature, but the stories and characters are so richly drawn that you get sucked into the story for the story’s sake! In this novel, upper class English rural lives are under the microscope and Weldon finds plenty to amuse us!

[Stine Holt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weldon's sharp and sarcastic pen always serves up a good read, this time being no exception. I do, however, find Weldon's brand of almost militant feminism and 'blame it on the man'-attitude somewhat onesided and aged, which of course is also due to the book being published in 1987. Bottom line: interesting read, which added a nuance to the literary feminist tradition.

[Astrid van ham · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is like if you made a venn diagram of all of weldon’s works and only used the central intersection. just extracted all of what makes them individually interesting and appealing. ive grown to hate this book for what its done to my view of weldon. had me believing her a sellout. honestly the existence of a second volume of life and loves was already extremely telling.

[Angelina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sharp and witty, well-written, but so angry, annoyingly political and preachy, that even the hint at the author's ironic distance in the very last sentence doesn't save the book from being a feminist's leaflet propaganda.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

not what you expect - brilliant!

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Het hart van het land"

[Sheena · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had just come out when I read it.Felt it hammered home it's message too hard