Alison Fell is nothing if not brave. Her first novel, Every Move You Make, published in 1984 was a contemporary epic of politics and sexual revolution. ("Everyone hated it. The right. The left. It stood on everybody's toes, but everyone wanted to read it.") Her third novel, Mer de Glace ("a tragedy") joint winner of the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award, was set on Mont Blanc, and required her qualifying as an alpliniste. Her fourth, The Pillow Boy Of The Lady Onogoru was set in 11th century Japan. ("It's a about a lady poet. Erotic. Filthy in parts - in the most literary way.") Now, with The Mistress of Lilliput, Alison Fell takes on the great panjandrum of satire himself, and comes up smelling of strawberries.
"I was in the British Library researching another book but it was proving too difficult, and I found myself taking Gulliver off the open shelves and reading it. Then one day, when I realised that his wife only had two lines in the book, it suddenly struck me that I would love to do a book about it. What started me off was the fact that Gulliver can't bear to let Mary into the room with him, and it struck me that he probably hated the smell of a female Yahoo more than he hated the smell of a male Yahoo. It irritated me, but until very recently I didn't know anything about Swift's extraordinary obsession with cleanliness which, in the 18th century, was utterly bizarre. It was just an instinct."
The Mistress of Lilliput begins where Gulliver's Travels ends, when Mary discovers that, far from seeking the feminine pleasures of the bedchamber on his return, her husband prefers the equine company of the stable. Rather than be committed to Bedlam for this quirky behaviour, Gulliver sets sail yet again.
With no reinstatement of conjugal relations on the horizon, and no desire to continue her enforced celibacy, his wife resolves to follow him, in company with her faithful companion since childhood, her doll, who acts as omniscient narrator to the adventures that follow.
The choice of narrator was pivotal, says Fell. "I'm looking always for the right form for a book. I'm always in a slight confusion, about who is the narrator, what voice is this going to be, and therefore how will the language run. You can start out a book narrating it with one style or narrator and get completely bogged down and realise it's nothing to do with what you want to explore. I started narrating from Mary's point of view, and I got so unhappy and thought, this is just not working. "I wanted her to be priggish and conflicted and all sorts of things but it just sounded like a bleat. It just didn't seem to address all the conflicts within the feminine psyche. I just wasn't having fun, and the language wasn't going into lovely mad areas that I like it to go into."
The idea of the doll came after a week of torment on holiday in Pembrokeshire (Fell had had a doll called Mary as a child) when everything fell into place. "I liked the fact that she was neutral, that she could have these tremendous longing fantasies and ragings of envy, because she can't do anything about it, whereas Mary can. Maybe it's something about being 50. When you get to 50, society kind of neuters you and that is a very infuriating position to be in, given how very sexual most women are at that age. You become invisible."
Yet for Alison Fell, being a feminist is secondary to being a socialist. Born into a working class family in the south of Scotland, her father, a mechanic, was "bolshy, always losing his job", so they were constantly on the move: Hamilton near Glasgow, Locherbie, and eventually the Highlands where there was plenty of work on the hydro-electric dams. Alison was bright and artistic, and it was in the Highlands that she began writing, first bodice rippers ("quite pornographic really") which she also illustrated, for the delectation of her 14-year-old friends, then poetry.
"I didn't understand where it came from. It was really quite imagistic. It was very much me trying to deal with my moods and my connections with the seasons and my connection with the land. Because we were completely emotionally inarticulate; we weren't brought up to be expressive. There was no emotion, there was no language for emotions. Other adolescents might have written about how depressed they were but I never used any words like that. I just wrote about the sheep and the mud flats and the Solway."
English literature held no appeal for her, however. James Bond, Mills and Boon and Zane Grey were the books the adolescent Alison borrowed from the library. She turned down university, opting instead for art school in Edinburgh where she studied sculpture for five years. Marriage and a baby led to a move to England where she became involved with street theatre and, in the 1970s, with the women's movement, eventually working for Spare Rib as fiction editor, contributing the odd cartoon.
In The Mistress Of Lilliput Fell has made no attempt to write a pastiche of the 18th-century novel. "You wouldn't have been able to read it if I had accurately rendered it in 18th century. It's a hybrid of my own." What she has captured is the dash and dazzle of its brightest practitioners while directing her gunfire at contemporary sacred cows, from London's Millennium Dome to the current obsession with cleanliness and bottled mineral water.
Where Swift titillated his readers with defecating Yahoos, Fell lets rip with priapic Lilliputians. The attempts of members of the Queen Bee Club to inseminate the shackled giantess, (the central attraction in a Popular Pleasure Palace designed to make money for the state and distract the populace from its poverty) make hilarious reading. Efforts to arouse her include teams of grouse beaters equipped with ostrich-feather flails, and a carousel of hounds who whose tongues "licked her lustily and never missed her turn".
Fell chose Lilliput as the focus of Mrs Gulliver's adventures because she liked the idea of playing around with scale and the feelings it would call up in a woman who was accustomed to think of herself as rather weak. "I was also interested in the idea of the woman being huge, not just for the obscene, Rabelaisian possibility, but the psychic feeling that a lot of women have, of taking up too much space in the world, in the sense of being too big for society, too broad in their emotions, their intuitions, their sixth senses. There's just too much of them to fit into small categories. One often does feel quite large and clumsy and wide and not what one imagines a woman ought to be in order to fit in."
Yet The Mistress of Lilliput is no feminist tract. "For Mary just to have gone off and found equality," she says "would have been no fun for me." Having escaped from Lilliput's pleasure dome, via a bond-breaking orgasm, and witnessed capitalist injustice at the hands of the Dutch, Mary arrives at the archipelago of Spechy, and its islands of Amina, Sumina and Oge, names those good at anagrams will have no difficulty in decoding. On Oge the faithful Mary is reunited with Mr Gulliver, whose madness has not abated but simply turned another corner.
Swift gave his satire verisimilitude by incorporating contemporary accounts of voyages to Australasia. For her part, Fell gives her narrative an extra dimension with the history of the strawberry. "Two-thirds of the way through the book I began to feel that Mary deserved to have a really fruity lover. And one morning I woke up asking myself who cross-bred the table strawberry as we know it." A week spent in the British Library Reading Room took her across oceans and continents and centuries and eventually to an 18th-century Frenchman called Duchene.
"I got this ancient book, Histoire du Fraisier Naturelle, and sat there with a magnifying glass and a French dictionary. And eventually I came to the very moment that he did it, where he writes that he made `une race nouvelle metisse'. I thought `I bet that means hybrid', and it did. In modern French metissage means multicultural - it's the new 1990s word - and that's what I wanted as the subtext of the book. I actually wept. I had these tears trickling down my face."
For the purposes of the narrative a few liberties were taken, Fell admits, but essentially M. Duchene's story is true. "I must admit that I fell in love with him and his project. It's such a beautiful thing to devote your life to. With all the manliness and the journeying and the nautical stuff, I felt I needed this more feminine text underneath building up, that would finally be the culmination of her journey."
Because, as the doll in The Mistress of Lilliput so perceptively realises, "like many of her sex, my mistress was more interested in the mysterious continents of her own nature than in regions further flung".
The Mistress of Lilliput is published by Doubleday (£12.99 in UK)
