Thy Queendom Come : DARCY’S UTOPIA <i> By Fay Weldon (Viking: $18.95; 235 pp.) </i>

In “Darcy’s Utopia,” Fay Weldon invents the magical Eleanor Darcy, an anti-heroine so entrancing that when you leave her after 235 pages, finally glimpsing her radical, raunchy, riveting self slouched in the back of a limo and buffing her nails, you feel a twinge of remorse.

That’s in “Darcy’s Utopia.”

In Dolan’s Utopia, on the other hand, once, just once, Fay Weldon lets a character break your heart.

Maybe it’s the plague of satire-lovers to want this barbed form to cut quickly but also reach inside, make that micro-turn away from the edge in order to leave a lasting taste beyond cartoon. This rarely happens. But one comes hopefully back to Weldon, always enjoying the journey for what it is and finding her characterizations fuller if not finally deeper.

Weldon’s style is never arid and her tone rarely angry, which separates her common-sense feminism from the raging polemics of many modern female writers and makes her a joy to read. Her visual evocations and sparing touch with social and household scenes put her right up there with one of her own favorite models, Jane Austen. Only Weldon is funny and surprising, surprising, surprising.

You rip through these pages waiting to topple on the description of newlyweds Leonard and Liese, drawn in terms of bed linens. Or Prune, “Poor Prune,” who married Jed of the tweedy jacket with orange-leather patches who worked up the red-carpeted stairs behind the door “where a little white plaque with a rim of roses said ‘Study,’ ” while Prune with the flat wide shoes wept over onions by the kitchen sink muttering, “Jed loves steak and onion pie.”

Behind every story line is a counterline taking on the presumptions of the first. While one character spouts the latest 12-point program for remaking the earth, another is finding her own utopia in a world where the bubble bath and robes are laid out next to the tub.

The story of “Darcy’s Utopia” is a simple romp, sort of:

Wendy and Ken have baby Apricot, then Wendy moves out and Wendy’s mother Rhoda moves in and marries Ken, so that Apricot’s mother becomes her sister and her grandmother is her mother. Then, at 17, Apricot marries Bernard and changes her name to Ellen, only Bernard is so Roman Catholic he refuses sex until Ellen threatens to convert and he tries sex once and becomes addicted. That lasts only until, seeing the Devil in Bernard’s eyes, Ellen moves on to meet the Vice Chancellor of Bridport University, economist/philosopher Dr. Julian Darcy, and Bernard falls for a big-breasted Westernized Pakistani student named Nerina, so Ellen changes her name to Eleanor.

Thus begins the movement called Darcy’s Utopia and Eleanor’s rise to fame. Having sloughed off the sanctimony of Bernard’s religious fervor and the smugness of his Marxist philosophizing, she sees both wisdom and opportunity in Darcy’s kind of dreams.

Eleanor’s story is revealed through a successful dual structure--on one level the history of Apricot/Ellen/Eleanor’s life and, on the other, her interviews with two journalists.

Valerie Jones is writing for Aura, a “ladies magazine,” and Hugo Vansitart, a “leading political journalist” who is “decidedly male,” is doing a think-tanky article--presumably for guys only--to appear in the Independent. The two meet at a journalism-awards dinner, sexually palpitate and instantly abandon their boring spouses and troublesome children to hole up in a fancy downtown Holiday Inn where they FAX off their interviews between constant, muscle-pounding sex and room-service meals.

Valerie, in the kind of accommodation Weldon knows women make all the time, leaves reporting on the Bridport Scandal and Darcian economics to Hugo, looking forward instead to seeing him in bed.

This tale is so well-paced throughout and the dialogue so smart that one can see the deftness Weldon acquired during her many years of writing for stage and television, including her award-winning scripts for the PBS series “Upstairs Downstairs.” It is the kind of jam-packed story which results in the description of Weldon’s work as “quirky.”

Don’t be fooled.

This quirkiness of hers has long had a purpose. Her world view, her opinion of the most current of events, slips between the lines of her smooth Brit dialogue like a sharp knife through Cornish cream.

Eleanor Darcy is the kind of rogue role model Weldon has been holding up for women in most of her dozen-plus novels. She has a healthy meanness of attitude toward social injustice, particularly female subjugation, but also ready kindness for strangers and no fear of sex.

But while Eleanor reflects much of Weldon’s own political philosophy toward the use of power and sex and the abuse of educational and financial systems, Weldon here goes further to take on nearly all utopians for the folly of their self-satisfied fantasies.

Eleanor is a character grasping for some wispy moral values hidden between the gross extremes of opinion she finds around her--that space between blind-faith notions of femaleness/maleness, God/religion and Devil/atheism, taking action and not action. She cloaks her dive into dualism in neat satire, never so brittle it might break or we might forget to laugh, but never so weak it fails to pop the beliefs of the Ronald Reagans and Maggie Thatchers of recent memory right in the nose.

Here, as in other of Weldon’s dozen-plus books, women are the carriers of common wisdom learned of necessity, and it is they--at least one or two of them--who hold the potential of rescuing and changing the world. Her men fade to ridiculousness.

Weldon once told an interviewer: “I tend to invent women and describe men. And I think men writers do the same thing, invent men and describe women. And the described character is weaker than the invented one . . . I feel I would like to find the male component of me and be able to write about it.”

Lacking discomfort with men, Weldon might be more free to give all her characters depth and passion and soul, to really commit to them. Certainly her females, who are always more faceted and true than her men, would benefit. And perhaps, then, they’d have a greater hold on our hearts.

As it is, even Weldon seems to feel she won’t miss Eleanor Darcy much at the end of this book. Here are the words she puts in the mouth of Valerie, who is taking a last look at new guru Eleanor through the window of the limo:

“I could not become uncritical; I could not ever come to worship and adore Eleanor Darcy . . . “

Were Fay Weldon more sympathetic toward her own people, we might cross the line between liking them and loving them. In the amusing Eleanor, we would find a bit of a fool, to be sure, but also a character to be cherished. Only then might we store her on the shelf of our most memorable utopians.