EBOOK
About
A weekend in the country erupts into a free-for-all of mutiny, sex, and murder On the anniversary of the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo, an assortment of unusual dinner guests gather at a remote country house to pay homage to Henry Shrapnel, inventor of the exploding cannonball. But all is not peaceful at the Shrapnel Academy: The downstairs servants, a group of third-world refugees led by a South African butler, are plotting to overthrow their upstairs oppressors. When a blizzard hits the countryside and traps everyone indoors, the rebellion erupts into bloody warfare throughout the Academy, "a shrine to the ethos of military excellence." With characters that include a domineering female sergeant, a war-mongering general, a brain-damaged spy, and an idiot-savant arms dealer, Fay Weldon gives us a country house novel replete with sexual atrocity and class warfare. No one will emerge unscathed in this stinging tale of modern-day barbarians, where the deadliest weapons are the ever-raging battles between the haves and the have-nots.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Weldon's best novels don't let either women or men off the hook . . . If there is a heroine in her novel it is probably the abrasive but endearingly sane feminist, Mew . . . her most admirable character is the biggest warmonger of them all, the urbane, sexy and distinguished General Makeshift."
The New York Times
"This time Weldon focuses her lethal spray of darkly comic assessments of the quirky-to-downright nasty in human relationships, on mankind's gloriously galumphing determination to eradicate itself . . . The inevitable Big Bang is truly impressive. An acidulously funny yet stinging commentary on our institutionalized homicidal lunacies, along with Weldon's casual reminder that the Gentle Reader (th
The New York Times
"An explosive novel, to English drawing room comedy what the Hindenburg was to zeppelin flight . . . a human sampler of the old Empire in accelerated decline."
Los Angeles Times