Leader of the Band

by Fay Weldon

Starlady Sandra leaves her boring husband and her successful television show to run off with a sax player and seek adventure, determined to have it all

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Novels

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

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

[Mehnaz Fatema · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I must say the rating could be a bit biased because I couldn't finish the book. It is also the fact that the book was too boring to read, hence I decided not to complete it. This was my first encounter with Fay Weldon's work, so I came in with no expectations. However, I found the narrative too scattered, and each time I returned after a break, I had to reconnect the dots, recall plotlines, and reorient myself. That constant mental labor took away from the experience and made reading feel more like a chore than a pleasure.

I also need to admit, I did appreciate how feminism was woven into the story, especially through the character of Sandra. Her choices were convention, and there was a quiet power in the way she asserted herself against societal norms. This thematic undercurrent gave me a reason to keep going, at least for a while, I genuinely wanted to see where her journey would lead. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough to sustain my interest in the long run.

In the end, I had to set it aside. While the feminist themes were intriguing and Sandra showed promise as a bold protagonist, the fragmented storytelling and lack of narrative momentum made it feel not worth the time investment. Perhaps Weldon’s style simply isn’t for me, or perhaps this wasn’t her strongest work. Either way, this book didn’t quite hit the mark.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ending bleh! Otherwise the book is excellent, like all fay weldon books.

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, clever, feminist. Want to read more Fay Weldon - hope her other books aren’t too similar in tone though

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still can't work out if Fay Weldon is so good she should be classified as literature, or if she's just a not-as-deep-as-she-sounds try-hard.
This story is not told linearly - Fay jumps all around the place so that we feel as though we are missing chunks of it. From the beginning you are on the back foot.
One interesting and very original inclusion is three of the short stories the main characters wrote. They serve to:
a) elaborate on the humour of Sandra not changing her friends' names when she records their situation and calls it fiction
b) show Sandra's lack of creativity and questions the wisdom of her choosing to become a writer
c) give us more detail about these people.

All of her books (that I've read so far, anyway) are about a woman's (usually a woman of a certain age) self-discovery. In this novel, the main character spends 42 years dealing with the idea of being a product of a Nazi and an insane woman. Her whole life seems to have been geared around denying, or rejecting, those parts of her genetic inheritance, and therefore rejecting the entirity of herself. In order to reject her mother's insanity, or fend it off at least, she strove to achieve in an intellectual field. In order to reject her father she refused to have children so there was no way of passing on his genes and in a way resurrecting him.
She has also been very much in control of her life. Until the night she evacuates her life.
This leads her to a journey of self-discovery that is also a physical journey. Being momentarily in limbo - sans husband, sans home and possessions, sans friends, sans job and colleagues - all she's left with is ghosts of her past memories and choices and ancestry.
And the result of this journey is that she doesn't need a man, and that she doesn't have to try to control her fate.

Yes, not a bad book at all. It stayed with me for a few days after I read it.

[Vel Veeter]

This is 1989 novel by Fay Weldon, the British novelist most famous for The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, a novel I read for a class in grad school (great class about body issues in literature) and a movie I saw weirdly as a kid a number of times starring Roseanne Barr and Ed Begley Jr and Meryl Streep.

But this book is about a woman who is on the cusp of leaving her loveless marriage and is following a jazz trumpetist into the wilds of French nightclubs in the mid-1980s. Her following him is both about him and not about him as she tries to work through the events and choices that have led her here.

This book is has an odd combination of an extremely rich narrative voice that is wildly intelligent and emotionally insightful, and also quite nasty. And not really the kind of righteous or ironic kind of nasty. It’s kind of just unpleasant. But at the same time, I agree with so much of what insight she provides. It’s the late 80s and so her attitudes on homosexuality and AIDS are a little too flippant and/or cavalier and that’s an issue, but also as a character study, it is fascinating.

So the consequence of this novel is that while I liked She-Devil a lot because of its clear biting satire, I don’t like this one as much because I am less clear on its tone, so much as the mood invoked by the tone.