| Title | : | The Cloning of Joanna May |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140128514 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140128512 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1989 |
The Cloning of Joanna May Reviews
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This could be the next step on from Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. The perfect woman. But this one has intelligence. Its a story of how she leaves her creator, her lover, and her adventures on her way to taking over the world. Its quite amusing to see the sex industry from the point of view of one who has no knowledge of morals. The end of the story is predictable, somewhat disappointing, but actually the only possible end.
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Actual rating 3,5-ish?
~CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS~
Wow. This book was completely different from what I expected, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I was expecting the story to have a science fiction feel to it (knowing nothing about the book beforehand since I accidentally pressed "play book" in my Storytel app and then thought I might aswell go with it). Turns out it's actually a story about female empowerment (yay). It is about cruel and misogynistic men, what they do to stay in control of women's lives and how karma might just catch up to them in the end.
SUMMARY
Joanna May is married to a wealthy but narcissistic man who will do most anything to keep her by his side. He frightens her, as he does most people, but at least she is never bored. She'd hate to be bored. When Carl stumbles upon Joanna's extramarital affair, he has her lover killed. She knows what he did but wastes no energy trying to prove it. The couple separates and for a moment it seems like Joanna's life might become boring after all. She does not yet know about Carl's backup plan.
Thirty years ago, she visited the doctor's office to get an abortion. Little did she know that her persuasive husband had the doctor harvest one of her eggs. That this egg would later be tinkered with in a lab, split into four and implanted in four different women.Women that would eventually give birth to Jane, Julia, Gina and Alice. Carl May's backup plan; the four clones of Joanna May.
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I know nothing about this book, if it's an early one and she hadn't found her footing, or if it's a late one and she's coasting on fumes, or if someone bet her she couldn't write a novel in one weekend, nothing, all I know is that I read it and I didn't get it.
Which essentially translates to "sometimes I love her but this was boring." Nobody did anything, not of any significance. It's not entirely plotless, but it's far more inclined in that direction than I find enjoyable. Joanna May herself complained a lot. Carl May complained a lot. Bethany didn't really complain but didn't do anything else either. I couldn't tell the four clones apart, so that doesn't bode well for how interesting and riveting they were as characters. And then it was over.
And all I could think was "why would someone write this? What was the point?" Perhaps it's a clever allegory about the rise of sectarian violence, or a fresh rethinking of a classic Welsh legend, or some other something that would give rise to this book rather than another, but if so, I couldn't spot it.
I only finished it because it was on Audible and I didn't know how much longer I had, so I kept waiting for a plot to kick in, then it ended.
(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.) -
Pretty good! There were some repetitive bits that got kind of boring (if Joanna May said "If thine eye offend thee pluck it out" one more time I was going to eat my shoelaces). But, a solid and very, very interesting book. I would've liked to see a little more of the clones and their interaction but other than that, I really enjoyed it!
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This is my second 1989 novel in a row by a British writer who recently died (but Weldon was a generation older than Mantel). This is my third Weldon novel, and the best. The writing is so good it’s almost painful how easily it seems to have come. Ditto for Weldon’s observations about people and life.
The only negative for me was that too much seems to have been repeated and stretched out — there’s a looseness to the novel. Too little effort in the writing and in the editing, I suppose. A 4.5. -
This is one of those books that everybody else has read but I just hadn't managed (everyone has lists of those, I know), so when I was walking along a shelf in the library and saw it looking at me I thought that "now is as good a time as ever" and borrowed it.
I'm just looking at the back of the book and there's a little quote from some reviewer (EXPRESS, it says), who says "An outrageously funny novel" and I'm having a real puzzling time about humour. I didn't for one moment find this book humorous. What is this? Do I just have no sense of humour? I always thought I had quite a good sense of humour, though people who laugh at those dreadful clips on the TV where somebody must have been hurt would probably think I don't. I just can't find it funny when hurt has been suffered. Embarrassment, mild hurt, yes. Mind you, things like Monty Python give me plenty of laughs, and you could say there's lots of physical humour there, but it's all so clearly fake.
But I digress wildly. Perhaps the EXPRESS found this funny because it's about cloning, which 20 years ago (the time of publishing) was a very out-of-it sci-fi sort of idea. And yet the book wasn't written as sci-fi.
Anyway, this is a rather SAD book, about a beautiful woman with a sad childhood who married a man who was extraordinarily abused childhood. He has no boundaries to what's acceptable - what he wants, he makes happen. In her middle-aged unhappiness she makes a serious midjudgment, and ends up divorced and desperately lonely.
We also have snippets of the four clones' lives - similar, yet not the same. And of course there's the heading towards a get-together.
I really enjoyed this book. Weldon writes well about the psychology of these people, and tells a good story. -
I wrote a longer review, but got a message that Goodreads was over-capacity, and it vanished. Not a great start!
Essentially, I found this booked flawed. The characters were weak and annoying, particularly the female characters, the plot was slow, the science of cloning in the book was iffy. It didn't really convince me, but I read to the end to see how it would turn out. Not a book I'd recommend personally, but if you want a fairly light melodrama with a tiny bit of (dodgy) science thrown in, you might enjoy it. -
Book 3
The Cloning of Joanna May
Fay Weldon
1989
4/5
I read more women than men. I don't mean to, it's just, generally speaking, women tend to negotiate the why rather than the how, so to speak, the emotional world rather than the mechanics of the novel, and that's what I enjoy the most. Generally speaking women go deeper, show more and from my reading-for-the-pleasure-of-it experience those who have mastered their craft have created books or a whole body of work that resembles very little else. Virginia Woolf, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Bernice Rubens, and this one, this anti-feminist feminist, one of literature's wickedest witches, Fay Weldon. Venom-spitting, toxic-dripping, yet always light-hearted, always up for a laugh at the absurdity of our situation, the false expectations, our vanity, our inability to accept our fundamental inadequacies and flaws. Only someone who really cares would negotiate the things that hurt the most, take themselves to the darker places of our condition and show us through fiction, through comedy even, our complex humanity.
This is not her best work. 350 pages are just not enough for what should be six main characters, in this plot, but it's still plenty, quite bonkers, inventive fun. -
DNF@20%
Couldn't get into it, didn't care. The main male character is horrible in a very non-believable way, somehow a too feminist-manifesto kind of evil. Didn't get enough of the female characters to care enough to go on. Admittedly, real life was stressful so maybe my heart wasn't in it. -
I did not like it
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Haven't read any books by Fay Weldon for years. Really good.
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I can't decide if it was brilliant or crap. So round about and supposedly clever. I am happy to be finished with it.
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*shrug*. Neither here nor there.
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No more to say that hasn't been said. Except: Fay Weldon at her perceptive best. Carl May and his sidekick Dr Holly play God, but the women have the last word. Brilliant.
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Feels like a very 80's novel, with themes of nuclear power danger, genetic research and gender identity. An enjoyable, fantastical romp!
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Interesting, a bit repetitive (though that was, I think, intentional).
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This is excellent.
So the science is wacky and a little dated, but the characterization is spot on.
This is an easy to read modern paperback which asks some pretty unsettling and challenging questions about privilege and personhood.
Our lead, Joanna, switches enticingly between icily distant and sympathetic and keeps you guessing. She is a brilliant portrait of a upper class woman who has isolated herself to such an extent from anyone she considers inferior that she really doesn't know how interact with anyone unless she needs them for something.
Honestly, read it. It is so worth your time and you would be giving tribute to a criminally underrated feminist author. -
I liked this novel.
After she divorces her controlling husband Carl, sixty-year-old Joanna May finds that her ex had cloned her thirty years ago. She searches and finds her four clones, the sister/daughters she has never had. Though their genes are identical, the five women are not as alike as one would imagine. They all have different interests and life-styles, and the new generation of Joannas now actually has the choices pioneered by the old. This book is more about the interaction of the women than it is about the freaky, futuristic cloning project of Jonanna's husband, for whom the story ends rather badly. This was a really good read. -
Categorizing novels in one genre or another is often based on arbitrary criteria, like the author's previous work, or the lack of a better label. Many authors who are labeled 'science fiction' would argue that their stories
are not sci-fi in the least, but rather explorations of the human condition. The Cloning of Joanna May falls into this category, I think. It's not so much about cloning as it is about the dissatisfaction after a life spent dedicated to a self-absorbed man. -
Male domination and loss of control over one's own body and identity are frequent themes in science fiction that often yield enjoyable tales. But this one, for me, lacked a believable plot and relatable characters.
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I can't believe I hadn't read this before, but it is still a timely and chilling story. Carl May sounds and acts like Donald Trump which makes this book even more chilling in terms of it's impact on women.
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Back cover sounded interesting, bit like "The third twin". But I gave up after 60 pages, didn't like the story up to there and especially not the style.
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I found this is an hostel in Vancouver all a bit creepy the thought of cloning and a bit depressing.
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Better the more I read. See my full review:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/8...
