FICTION: We Are All Made of Glueby Marina Lewycka Penguin Fig Tree, 419pp, £18.99: THE ABILITY to write a comic novel about sad subjects without descending into mawkishness or awkwardness is a rare one. Sue Townsend, creator of Adrian Mole, has this skill; so does Marian Keyes.
And so too does Marina Lewycka, whose entertaining new novel takes in the Holocaust, marital breakdown, the consequences of the miners’ strike, Israeli-Palestinian relations, religious conspiracy theorists, scheming estate agents, corrupt social workers and the dreadful powerlessness of old age. And yes, it is a comedy. Sort of.
Our heroine, Georgie Sinclair, is a journalist who dreams of writing a bodice-ripping bestseller but instead is a contributor to the glue-industry magazine Adhesives in the Modern World. Her personal life is falling apart; her husband, Rip, has moved out and her sweet, earnest teenage son, Ben, is increasingly obsessed with apocalyptic religious websites. Then she meets an eccentric old Jewish German woman called Naomi Shapiro, who lives with an army of cats in a vast and decrepit nearby mansion, Canaan House.
When Mrs Shapiro is taken into hospital, Georgie is astonished (and not exactly pleased) to discover that the old lady has named Georgie as her next of kin. Checking in on both the house and the cats, Georgie becomes intrigued by Mrs Shapiro’s murky past, and begins to uncover an extraordinary story. She also finds herself forced to battle with a social worker who seems strangely determined to ensure Mrs Shapiro doesn’t return home, and discovers there are plenty of people who want to get their hands on Canaan House. In other hands, this could have been a grim story about the tragic fate of an elderly Holocaust refugee and the abandoned woman who is thwarted by terrifying bureaucracy when she tries to save her. But the wry, absurd tone of Lewycka’s writing adds a strange, almost fairytale-like air to the story. The charismatic estate agents who want to get hold of Mrs Shapiro’s house are called Diabello and Wolfe; cats come and go through a supposedly locked-up house; Georgie discovers her inner scarlet woman. And yet it all feels utterly convincing. Indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of the novel is its unpredictability. Throughout the book, characters pop up and quickly find their places in the narrative, fitting together smoothly with the rest of the eccentric cast. Canaan House fills up with people from pre-war Hamburg, from Palestine, from modern Israel, all looking for a home.
Georgie too is, in her own way, a displaced person, a Yorkshire woman adrift in unfamiliar North London. She also refuses to conform to the usual fictional stereotype of the scorned middle-aged woman. At times she’s frustrated or sad, but she’s never pathetic. She does her best for Mrs Shapiro, but she’s not a noble saint. And when she does develop a passionate relationship with the handsome estate agent Mark Diabello, she realises that not only is he a bit boring, but he also writes awful poetry and she’d rather be alone than continue with him.
From the title on, Lewycka does have a tendency to over-do the glue analogies – Georgia frequently ponders the bonding elements of the various adhesives she’s writing about, and wonders why human beings can’t learn to follow their example. But that’s a minor quibble. In this strange, charming, funny and surprisingly touching book, Lewycka offers an ultimately optimistic vision of a world in which former enemies can find common ground and, yes, stick together.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist