A Woman's Place
By Edwina Currie
Hodder and Stoughton, 1996. 454 pp.
$39.95 (hb) (also available in paperback)
Reviewed by Tony Smith
In this sequel to the steamy A Parliamentary Affair, Elaine Stalker MP climbs the greasy pole of the English ministry. Her ex-lover, Roger Dickson, becomes Conservative prime minister and suppresses his inclinations to sponsor her career, but talent wins through anyway.
Stalker rises when the unscrupulous Derek Harrison becomes implicated in corrupt practices. Retired to the backbench, he becomes a bitter critic of government and a staunch defender of MPs' perks, especially the "cash for questions" said to be so appealing to Westminster MPs because of their inadequate salaries.
Junior minister Anthony York also bites the dust, in a sub-plot involving the vile journalist Jim Betts — he of the yellow teeth and grubby briefs, who raped Stalker's daughter Karen while trying to get the dirt on her mother in the earlier tale. York, sexually confused, lashes out at an HIV worker; the resulting police and media attention drive him to despair and a rural river.
The chief policy problem involves hospital closures which throw homicidal psychopaths onto the streets. The other 99% are not such a worry, apparently. At one such institution marked for closure, Stalker is pelted with tomatoes, but when the demonstrators disperse, one of their number is dead, knifed in the throat.
Karen draws the sub-plots together. She happens to share a house with the suicide, a backbench MP and an American student of psychiatry who just happens to be treating a man with a fetish for Stalker — a Stalker stalker.
Despite these incredible coincidences and the constant sentimentality (causing Stalker to "gasp inwardly" at the sight of her ex-lover's neck), Currie takes on serious themes. Thus Stalker remarks that a woman's place seems not to be in the home, or kitchen, or the House of Commons, but in the wrong, whatever she tries. Her Tory-feminist credentials lead her to express dismay at her side's opposition to the establishment of a Commons creche — to balance the basement rifle range — but they do not commit her to speak her mind on the issue.
As though under the curse of "the Blessed Margaret", an accident-prone government faces ongoing crisis over European union. This gives the story a factual background, but it is Currie's evocation of the Westminster scenes and manners which make the book worthwhile. Currie produces "inside dopesterism" of a high order. The colour and traditions are described warts and all, the stability along with the oppression.
There are touches of humour and a hint of self-parody when Stalker lends her daughter a book for holiday reading. Its title? A Parliamentary Affair. Author? Not mentioned. The climax, by contrast, is violent and unmerciful to the heroine, who seems for the moment to have had her fill of public life.
Fans of Currie will welcome the return of familiar characters and be delighted that her style is more assured, except perhaps in the sex scenes, which seem somewhat clichéd. New readers need not fear that knowledge of the earlier tale is required. The themes of corruption, jealousy and the paradoxes in which women of ambition find themselves, are clearly, if somewhat floridly conveyed. Stalker may be portrayed as victim, but Currie's courage and political cunning are established beyond any doubt. She — or they — will be back.