[In the following review, Craig considers The Cloning of Joanna May not up to Weldon's usual high standards.]

Fay Weldon's current practice is to take some exorbitant facet of modern life—political intrigue, television stardom, plastic surgery—and incorporate it into one of her colourful little analyses of the drive towards misbehaviour and the clashing interests of men and women. In The Cloning of Joanna May, her fourteenth novel, it is genetic engineering that set things going. "Fiddling around with women's eggs", as a character puts it, is one of the enormities open to enterprising operators. The story is this: Joanna May's husband Carl May, without her knowledge and with the co-operation of a Dr Holly, has imposed a novel means of reproduction on his thirty-year-old wife. An egg is removed from her womb, split into four and implanted elsewhere, and with the resulting births new versions of the original are obtained. This outrageous multiplication is supposed to have taken place in the 1950s, and it's thirty years before the prototype gets to hear about the copies. In the meantime, Carl May has divorced her for infidelity with an Egyptologist, relegated her to a house on the banks of the Thames, near Maidenhead, and dealt with the man, the culprit, by having him run over.

Carl May, a power in the land as the blurb describes him, has risen not only from sordid but from unspeakable beginnings. His mother kept him chained in a dog kennel. Weldon often lumbers her characters with some egregious ancestry, as if in deference to a tabloid view of the world, or at least in acknowledgement of all the awfulness that exists and gets reported in newspapers. Her fiction tends to be sensational in content, to underscore her aversion to this or that social abuse, but very much toned down in manner: she is famous for being both audacious and sardonic in her approach. She sets out to make the preposterous plausible (more or less), as in Life and Loves of a She-Devil, as well as indicating the universal significance in all the little individual plots and predicaments she creates. All her characters come complete with striking life histories and sociological implications, neatly summarized. The new novel considers (among other things) the question of identity, and whether this is strengthened or diluted by replication; the effect of environment comes into it too. The book's peculiar premise enables it to demonstrate what becomes of an individual in varying circumstances: the May clones are, respectively, a journalist, a fashion model, a childless suburban housewife and a knocked-about mother-of-three.

As well as the topical decoration we expect from Fay Weldon—child abuse, genetic gimmickry and nuclear alarms—the narrative accommodates some not very pointed punning ("If the I offend thee pluck it out") and some over-insistent patterning, as, for example, with the paired-off systems of nuclear physics and Egyptology, technology and the Tarot pack, self-determination and divination. It is all too much, like Carl May's posited power over life and death, which leads to the notion that it is possible to get yourself re-created as your ex-wife's quasi-grand-child. Fay Weldon would seem to be upholding the life-instinct, in however distorted a form it manifests itself; with this novel, however, she has got herself into something of a muddle through mucking about with the universe.

As Weldon's concerns get larger, her style seems to go to pot. Instead of the usual sharpness we find banality ("Where did clouds come from?" wonders one of the characters in a woolly moment, while another thinks with affection of "his wife, sharer of his chips"). Overwriting and tiresomeness come into the picture too—"how could she, being female, give birth to something male?" Exchanges of the utmost childishness take place between the Chairman of Britnuc and his repudiated wife: "You have made me bad, Joanna May …"; "You have destroyed me", she says to him. Worst of all is the clumsiness that has overtaken Fay Weldon's prose. The following sentence isn't untypical:

Without the assault of these passionate saving graces she would have aged slowly and gracefully, developed a touch of arthritis here, a backache there: Oliver would have drifted off … and her fate would have indeed been that of the elderly woman who has never been employed, has no husband, no children, no former colleagues or particular interests, a handful of friends still around, with any luck (though their particular loyalties stretched by distance, exhaustion, their own problems) but who is fortunate enough to have a lot of money.

The plot keeps coming back to Carl May, his "bimbo", Bethany (brought up in a brothel), his spectacular progress from dog house to executive suite, and his vengefulness; but it only becomes gripping, in the customary Weldon manner, when we got to the clones and their eventual meeting. What this leads to is an assertion of feminine, or sisterly, solidarity: all very fine and inspiriting, but not quite sufficient to quell our unease with ingredients such as rebirth, rottenness and a kennel upbringing—presented, by and large, without the deftness we associate with this author. Still, what with man-made disasters, like Chernobyl, and those coming out of the blue, like the great wind of the autumn before last, Fay Weldon perhaps has a point in envisaging all our days as dogdays.