Life and loves of a mischievous devil

One of the reasons that I have never much cared for Fay Weldon's novels is that they seem to have a certain bullying quality about them. Not a hairpulling, wrist-twisting sort of bullying, but a kind of insistent emotional tyranny, like the girl in the playground who decides that she is going to be your friend, whatever views to the contrary you may entertain.

Weldon's novelistic persona is perpetually there, standing a bit too close and breathing all over you, nudging you in the ribs in case you've missed some nuance of the action, keeping up a constant patter of coy little quasi-aphorisms, each of which has the tired tinkliness of a newspaper horoscope or fortune-cookie motto, as though no one ever quite thought of it for the first time.

One advances a trifle warily on the autobiography of a writer whose immensely popular and successful novels one knows one dislikes. No one - or very few people - really enjoys not liking things. It is human nature to want to praise, to admire, to be entertained. The title of Weldon's memoir, Auto Da Fay, is not engaging. It sounds as though it were thought up by a jaded sub-editor late on production night after an incautious trip to the Dog and Duck. And anyway, the pun doesn't work, does it? No immolation on grounds of faith here, surely?

The jacket design, on the other hand, is strangely disarming. It shows a painting of a small girl, evidently Weldon, whose looks have changed very little - facelift or no facelift - in the intervening decades, dressed in a tidy red gingham frock and harsh green cardie, flanked by a brace of rather horrible dollies, gazing with that familiar, knowing little smile, which is, you notice, unnervingly at odds with the expression in her vast, blank, blue eyes that could be dread, or a terrible resignation, or simply acute boredom.

In the book, Fay (who turns out not really to be called Fay at all, but Franklin, with a considerable string of different surnames on top: she has theories about changing your name and the subsequent effects on the personality of doing so) says that the child's expression in the picture is probably boredom - unlike her sister, Jane, who was also in the painting, she had trouble sitting still. But hindsight could equally well read those darker emotions into the child's harebell stare. Truth, as Weldon remarks here, on more than one occasion, is much stranger than fiction. And, a reader's voice might add, ever so much more interesting.

The story is one of genteel horror, resourcefully borne. On both her parents' sides of the family there are patterns of emotional disruption. Weldon is interested in patterns, perhaps because so much of her own early life seems so frighteningly unpredictable - one or another parent absent; continual changes of home and school; a wrenching move from the comparative security of New Zealand to grey, postwar Britain; abandonment and madness, unexpected pregnancy and forgotten birthdays - all accompanied by the kind of poverty that is the more grinding for being respectable.

At one point - when she marries a Mr Bateman in order to provide a home for her fatherless-baby - the narrative sidesteps from first person into third, remarking laconically that "Fay Bateman is more than the current 'I' can bear". The story stops quite suddenly, too, with the birth of her second child. "What I do from now on ... is write, and let living take a minor role," she concludes, a trifle mischievously, since it is, after all, still only 1963.

The horrors are recounted with a sprightliness that seems, when one knows that a real person endured them, more gallant than annoying. The aphoristic tendency flourishes, too: " People trusted far more to luck then than they do today." "Today's teenagers ... have to take their ecstasy in pill form; we created our own." And so on.

At such moments, Weldon can sound like a version of Lynda Lee-Potter on whom some kind fairy has bestowed an enhanced gift for narrative. But when one considers the nature of that narrative, the brutal unsteadiness of the voyage that she has navigated with the help of these little verbal aids to buoyancy, suddenly, the garish colours and irritating tendency of her literary style to bob about seem not merely explicable, but endearing and - with a sudden shift of focus - admirable.