Weldon’s Devil possesses the

DEATH OF A SHE DEVIL by Fay Weldon Head of Zeus, £16.99

IN this follow-up to her most celebrated novel, Fay Weldon turns the world she created in The Life And Loves Of A She Devil on its head.

She Devil Ruth Patchett is now 84, living in the tower she inherited from her husband Bobbo’s lover Mary Fisher and running her Institute For Gender Parity.

Thirty-four years ago, at the end of the original novel, She Devil Ruth had gone through a crazy odyssey of revenge, seeing her husband imprisoned in financial disgrace and his lover Mary Fisher pining away from cancer. Ruth emerged the victor.

But in Death Of A She Devil, all is far from the feminist paradise which Ruth – now Lady Patchett – had hoped for. Her fortunes are declining, partly due to age and infirmity but also because the times have changed.

Bobbo is now kept alive by a comely nurse in a room in the tower, the money is running out, the institute is full of bickering women and Ruth is estranged from her children and grandchildren.

Worst of all as far as Ruth is concerned, dangerous young beauty Valerie Valeria is worming her way into the institute with her modern feminist thinking. Valerie Valeria wants to usurp Ruth and start treating men more fairly, involving them in the work of the institute.

It is Valerie’s idea to create a grand feminist event at the tower, the Widdershins Walk, in which a procession will march anticlockwise around Ruth’s tower to mark the 40th anniversary of the IPG. The Widdershins Walk is a metaphor, surely, for the way Weldon feels about modern feminism: that it has taken the world backwards.

Tyler, Ruth’s grandson, is the embodiment of this shift in attitude towards men. Handsome and charming, he is a graduate who cannot get a job because they are all given to women. He is bullied by his own mother – who wanted to abort him because he was a boy – and