The Starlady and the Jumpers

Press, 18 February 1989, Page 27

The Starlady and the Jumpers

Leader of the Band. By Fay Weldon. Hodder and Stoughton, 1988. 196 pp. $29.95. (Reviewed by Joan Curry) “Starlady Sandra” is famous for presenting a television astronomy programme, and for having discovered a new planet. She is clever enough to be tipped as the next Astronomer Royal, and she is old enough to know better than to slip into the bushes at a smart garden party with a sexy jazz trumpeter just because she feels like it. But she does, and that is the end of Starlady Sandra and the beginning of Sandra the groupie. She abandons her job, her stuffy lawyer husband, her friends, her comfortable life, and follows the “Citronella Jumpers” to France, to enjoy the services of the leader of the band, when he isn’t playing jazz. What makes Sandra unusual is that she is the product of a Nazi experiment in genetics. Her mother ■was one of those selected for her looks and her youth to produce babies under a variety of controlled conditions in wartime Germany. But she was mentally unstable and was eventually committed to an asylum. Sandra’s younger brother inherited his mother’s

weakness and threw himself under a train in his despair. Sandra herself, this intelligent, beautiful woman who was created in a laboratory at the whim of a man with grandiose ideas of human engineering, has grown up feeling “unentitled ... to an ordinary existence. Unclassed, denatured, dis-allowed.” In quiet moments she is beset by ghosts — her unborn children, her mad brother, the ringing of a nonexistent telephone. She wonders about the many unknown half-brothers and half-sisters created during his experiments by her father, dubbed "the Mad Sadist of Bleritz” at the Nuremberg Trials after the war.

Most of all she is beset by thoughts of the elements that make up a given human being — genes, environment, heredity, chance, luck. In France, with nothing to do while she is waiting around for Jack, she finally has the time and the space to consider the whole matter of who and what she is.

If this sounds solemn, the book certainly isn’t. It is rich, pacy and often funny. Fay Weldon amuses herself charting Sandra’s progress as she finds herself capable of

scandalous behaviour after more than 40 years of conforming to the social requirements of her life and times. Then there are the “Citronella Jumpers,” who could stand for the untidiness and randomness of life in general. The band’s music, and slapdash progress through the French tour, afford Fay Weldon plenty of amusement. "This band doesn’t want things to go smoothly. It’s not the way we work. We like to pick things up by osmosis. We do not want to be organised. Efficiency is the enemy of creative energy,” declares Mad Jack. He is wrong, of course, and that is why the band usually plays such rotten jazz. Sandra, with her knowledge of the pattern of the universe, tries to explain that in jazz as in everything else it is form that matters most, then style, and last, and least, content. “Get the form right, grasp the whole before the detail, and then it will surely add up to more than the sum of its parts,” she whispers in his ear as he sleeps. What holds for jazz holds for the universe. The elements of life form a pattern: get the pattern right and the elements fall into place and start making sense. The astronomer and the musician and the geneticist must all try to get the pattern right first.