Ciara's Reviews > Chalcot Crescent

set in a dystopian near-future/alternate universe in which the current financial crisis has calcified into a new world order. set in england, which is being run by the national unity government, a quasi-dictatorship comprised of social scientists. frances, our 80-year-old narrator, lives alone in the home she bought her ex-husband out of after their divorce. she had been a well-known author & playwright in her younger days, but blew through her money while everyone else was blowing through their money, thinking the good times would never end. now she struggles to get by & has complicated relationships with her two daughters & various grandchildren.

her ex-husband's son by another woman is now an adult & forms frances's grandchildren into a revolutionary cell bent on kidnapping a high-ranking NUG official (who happens to be frances's son-in-law) & staging a bloodless coup. they make frances's house their home base, & frances makes the decision to, first, try to prevent the kidnapping by warning her daughter. but in the process, she learns a long-kept family secret & decides not to prevent the kidnapping. instead, she waits until it's done & she's alone with the captive, & then she alerts NUG.

&...yeah, that's pretty much the whole plot of the book. most of what surrounds this is frances's recollections of her youthful dalliances, her writing career, & the financial & political changes that took place, bringing the world to its current configuration. apparently frances is & was a radical feminist, & is sympathetic in some respects to the aims of her grandchildren's revolutionary goals, but she is also jaded by age & experience & has a lot of pointed things to say about youthful idealism & naivete in politics. i really enjoyed that aspect of the book a lot.

the writing dragged at times. it took me a while to get into weldon's tendency to repeat the same phrases again & again. at first, i wasn't sure if it was a narrative device, or if she'd just forgotten that she'd already used that exact same wording a time or two already. but the plot & the characters kept me going, & i'm glad, because i found the story really engaging. i finished the book in just a few hours.