Published in 1976. Looks good for its age. Pages have hardly started to yellow. The dust jacket shows some wear and tear and other signs of ageing. Page edges also show some minor signs of wear.
Madeleine wants revenge: Madeleine wants to be remembered: Madeleine wants love. Who doesn’t? Madeleine is ex-wife of and chief persecutor to Jarvis, the architect. Why not? She hates him. Hilary is their daughter, growing fatter and lumpier every day under Madeleine’s triumphant care, witness to the wrongs her mother suffered.
For Jarvis has a clean new life with a clean new wife, Lily, and a nice new baby, Jonathan. The furniture is polished and there is orange juice for breakfast. Jarvis is content, or thinks he is, fending off Madeleine’s forays as best he can.
Jarvis has a part-time secretary, too, Margot, now the doctor’s wife, unremembered from the days of her youth. Margot, unacknowledged wife and mother, accepting, tending, nurturing his children and her own, complaisant in her lot.
Until Madeleine, hurling out her dark reproaches from the other side of violent death, uncovers new familial links in the disruption she creates.
Fay Weldon cuts through to the core of the meanings beneath everyday speech and manners. In Remember Me she has written a novel that describes the essential forces which conjoin parent and child, husband and wife and lover. Her writing has originality, elegance, humour; this is an impressive and disturbing novel.
“Her writing is precise, compassionate and murderously funny. What’s more, in the last resort, it’s optimistic.” – Sunday Times
