FICTION: Various Pets Alive and Dead, By Marina Lewycka Fig Tree, 364pp. £12.99
IT’S 2008, AND THE world’s financial house of cards is about to come tumbling down. Lehman Brothers has gone bust, the subprime market has collapsed and the economy is floundering in a deluge of toxic assets.
For Doro and Marcus, it’s proof of what they’ve been banging on about since they started their hippie commune, Solidarity Hall, back in 1969: capitalism’s days are numbered, and soon a new social contract will have to be drawn up along more equitable lines. The commune members once thought they could smash the system by eating lentils, wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, sharing clothes, food and socialist ideas, and having a sex rota; now, though, it looks as if the system is breaking down under the weight of its own avarice.
For their mathematical genius son, Serge, however, the roiling confusion in the markets is a golden opportunity to cash in by dabbling in a little short-selling. His parents think he’s studying for a degree in Cambridge, but he has dropped out to take a high-flying City job as a quant – a quantitative analyst – for a financial trading company. He’s besotted with his Ukrainian colleague, Maroushka, but she seems to have an agenda of her own. If only he could make her see the really cool guy behind the geek-chic exterior, and if only he were richer, he could whisk her away to that luxury hideaway in Brazil.
Doro and Marcus’s eldest daughter, Clara, meanwhile, is working as a primary-school teacher in Doncaster, nursing a schoolgirl crush on the headmaster, Mr Gorst/Alan (she’s not sure which she should call him, so calls him both). She believes she can save the world by setting up a tree-seed stall and recycling station on community day, and inviting Doro along to demonstrate her vegetable-sculpting skills.
Clara is frustrated at the way her life is going, irritated by her flaky family and haunted by the deaths of several pet rabbits and a hamster when she was a girl growing up in Solidarity Hall. She seems to be the kiss of death for pets, so when the school caretaker presents her class with a hamster Clara feels a sudden onset of panic: if it dies, it will probably be her fault.
If that’s not worry enough for her, there’s also the troubling news that her parents are planning finally to get married, though they haven’t yet told their youngest daughter, Oolie-Anna, who has Down syndrome. Why bother tying the knot now, after all this time, wonders Clara. Why rock the old boat? And why doesn’t Serge ever answer his mobile phone?
On top of all this, Oolie-Anna, born in the commune and adopted by Doro and Marcus, is pressuring Doro to let her live in her own apartment. She may have Down syndrome, but, she argues, “I’m not daft!”
Doro is unsure: her daughter is permanently horny: will she remember to take her pill? Besides, there’s still the mystery of who started the great fire in Solidarity Hall that effectively put an end to the family’s alternative utopia. And then there’s the nagging question of Oolie-Anna’s true parentage.
Marina Lewycka made a grand entrance on the fiction scene with her 2005 debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a comic adventure involving two feuding sisters, their elderly widowed father, a busty Ukrainian gold-digger and a fleet of vintage eastern-bloc farming machinery. Mixing biting satire, bittersweet family drama and a trainspotter's knowledge of the mechanical workhorses of Soviet collectivism, the novel proved a winner. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, losing out that year to Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, to Ukrainian parents, Lewycka put enough of her own culture and experience into her debut novel to make it feel authentic. It was also laugh-aloud-on-the-Dart funny. Her second novel, Two Caravans, attempted to tackle the serious issue of human trafficking and, as a result, had an often forced comedic tone. For this fourth novel she has gone back to what she's good at: delving into family dynamics and exploring the comedic possibilities that emerge when old values are set against new realities.
She doesn’t always realise those possibilities: there’s a clumsy set piece involving collapsing stalls at community day, and an overcooked scene in which several characters call to the same house in the same 10-minute period, with less than hilarious results. And then there are the misheard phrases peppered throughout – “domestic sphere” becomes “Domestos fear” – which even Mrs Malaprop would have turned up her nose at.
Overall, though, Lewycka’s instinct for humour is spot on, and we warm to her characters enough to imagine them being played by well-known comedy names of TV and film. (Judi Dench as Doro? Why not?)
This time around, there’s less focus on ethnic background, apart from the mysterious, aloof Maroushka; in general Lewycka is more interested in her characters’ conflicting ideals and what happens when they inevitably crash into each other.
If you're looking for a postrecession novel that nails the financial debacle in concise, witty style, Various Pets Alive and Dead does the job with admirable efficiency. "Imagine gambling in a casino . . . and everything you win, you keep," says one of Serge's colleagues. "And every time you lose, a kind-hearted donkey called Joe Public comes along with a sack of gold and pays off your debt."
David McWilliams couldn’t have put it better.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist
