A short history of Lewycka

The novelist Marina Lewycka, whose new book is about hippy parents and their rebelliously strait-laced children, tells ARMINTA WALLACEabout triumphalist bankers, doorless toilets and keeping power in check

THE BANKING CRISIS may not be amusing in real life, but it has proved to be a winner on the fiction front. It has already produced a fistful of satirical novels, among them Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money, Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December and John Lanchester’s Capital. Marina Lewycka, author of the bestselling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, is getting in on the act too, with her book Various Pets Alive and Dead.

It’s a tale of two generations: Doro and Marcus, lefty hippies who spent 30 years living a communal life of lentils and radical politics, and their children, a teacher called Clara, who craves order and clean bathrooms, and Serge, a maths whizz who is earning vast sums of money as a quantitative analyst with a London bank but is ashamed to tell his parents, who think he’s penniless and working on a PhD at Cambridge.

“It’s a story about values, without trying to be too serious and preachy,” says Lewycka with a smile.

In person, she is, like her writing, extremely energetic and, in contrast to her name, extremely English.

Was she at all daunted, researching the world of high finance? She laughs. “It’s almost like I touched the dark side,” she says. “I talked to a lot of bankers – and, of course, they’re utterly charming. Not demonic at all. But there was a slight sense of . . . almost . . . triumphalism. The feeling that they got away with it. And they’re still getting away with it in the UK, where our government is committed to letting them get away with it in a way that a lot of people find quite shocking.”

The star of Various Pets Alive and Dead is Maroushka, a young Slavic immigrant who, after a spell as an office cleaner, ends up working alongside Serge on the risk-based derivatives desk. She is clad from head to foot in killer labels, and such gems of wisdom as “Advanced algorithm can price and calibrate multi-name factor models between bespoke and standard indexes portfolios” flow easily from her immaculately painted lips.

Lewycka is indignant at the suggestion that Maroushka’s metamorphosis might be a somewhat unlikely plot development. “Lots of very, very highly qualified and highly educated people come over from eastern Europe,” she says. “My cleaner is actually a qualified doctor. It takes people a long time to get their qualifications accepted over here. And if someone is a student, it’s the obvious thing to do, to work for an agency as a cleaner. It’s really not at all improbable.”

The author’s passion on this topic comes from her life experience. She was born in a refugee camp in Germany and arrived in England with her Ukrainian parents after the second World War. Her mother worked as a housekeeper while her father travelled around the UK driving tractors wherever he could find work. It was, Lewycka says, a blissful childhood; the hostility and dislocation often faced by today’s immigrants were completely absent.

But Lewycka is also a child of the 1960s who imbibed the leftist counterculture with her cornflakes. A central theme in Various Pets is the disparity between the ideals of communal living and its often tawdry realities, a subject she knows at first hand, having spent several years living in squats in London during her rebellious youth.

“We had very serious intentions,” she says. “We were squalid, but we were high-minded. Our living conditions were extraordinarily filthy, but our hearts were pure.”

Along with a couple of female friends, she once broke into a house that had been boarded up by the council. “We crept along the street in our duffle coats, made a tiny hole in the centre of the window, broke the glass, unscrewed the latch, lifted up the sash, and in we went.”

Once inside, they swiftly realised why the house had been declared unfit to live in. “It did have running water from the cold tap in the kitchen, and a sort of geyser which didn’t work – occasionally, we’d get a lukewarm dribble – and the toilet was in the back garden in a little outdoor lean-to.

“There was a railway line at the bottom of the garden, and there was no door on the loo. It was all right while the trains were moving fast, but once in a while they’d stop. You had to choose your moment.”

Timing is everything in publishing, too – especially in comic fiction. But Lewycka didn’t set out to write comic novels. “I sort of stumbled into it, really,” she says.

Her first book, “a sort of political thriller”, was rejected 36 times by publishers. “So I thought, Enough of all this: I’m just going to do something which I’ll enjoy writing and which will entertain my friends. I never thought it would be published.”

The something turned out to be A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, the tale of an 84-year-old widower who falls for a 36-year-old divorcee, to the horror of his adult children. It was shortlisted for the Orange prize and longlisted for the Man Booker before going on to take the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award.

Lewycka followed it with Two Caravans, about migrant workers from Ukraine who are bused around the UK to do the jobs nobody else wants to do. Her third novel, We Are All Made of Glue, combined the unlikely topics of adhesive bonding and the Holocaust.

All three books are built on firm, if unobtrusive, political foundations. And Lewycka’s comedy, though gentle, is applied fearlessly across the board; in Various Pets Alive and Dead, it’s not just the bankers who get it in the neck. Doro has retired from hippiedom only to join an allotment activist group whose acronym is, to her dismay, Gaga. More controversially, the upfront sexuality of her adopted daughter, who has Down syndrome, is also regarded as a legitimate target for satire.

Yet Lewycka says she’s much less of a rebel nowadays than she used to be. “What I think now is that no one set of people or ideology has the answers,” she says. “What I believe in is checks and balances. If any group, or individual, gets to be too powerful, that power is abused. It’s not as if getting this lot of leaders out and getting another lot of leaders in is going to solve everything. The important thing is to have a system in which any concentration of power is checked.”

Various Pets Alive and Dead, by Marina Lewycka, is published by Fig Tree, £12.99