Flamingo S.
2 total works
A turbine-driven fantasy of love and revenge, values and morals: a witty and compellng elixir.
Bernard Bellamy has done a deal. He’s sold out to the Devil, in all his forms. In return, he is promised that all his wishes will be granted, all his desires fulfilled. One of them, young Carmen Wedmore, is proving to be quite a challenge.
Carmen lives in the new town of Fenedge, East Anglia, near her former schoolfriends Laura and Annie. The three girls dream of the day they’ll escape their dullsville existence. While Annie flies off with a fluttering, blipping heart to the snowcapped peaks and frothy rapids of New Zealand to join the man of her dreams and Laura marries, capably moving the population graph a few notches higher, Carmen stays in Fenedge, under the powerful clasp of Sir Bernard and Driver, the Devil’s agent. Disguised as a suave chauffeur, Driver cruises in his plush, shiny, sinister limo, stalking her every move.
But Carmen becomes ever more determined to ride out the temptations laid in her path and not to sell her soul. Will she eventually succumb? Or will the Devil, for once, not have everything his own way?
With the husband in jail for imperiling the financial structure of the nation, Eleanor grants exclusive interviews to two journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valerie Jones. Though they seem more preoccupied with each other than with their elusive subject, their goal is the same: to capture the essence of Eleanor Darcy. Hugo is loking for truth and pragmatism in Eleanor's vision: Valerie is in quest of the woman's struggle.
From their diverse portraits, Eleanor Darcy emerges, and 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.
Fay Weldon has once again skewered the conventions of modern society with wit and wisdom, shining her flashlight on the threadbare morals of modern life.