Review - The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid by Marina Lewycka

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The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid
Marina Lewycka
Penguin Fig Tree, 5 March 2020
HB, 261pp

'A love triangle with gangsters? Not a good idea.'

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid via NetGalley.

Unusually, Lewycka opens this book with a couple of pages setting the scene and - apparently - telling us how to approach the characters.There are George and Rosie Pantis. George, aged 79 and retired as a philosophy lecturer to write poetry (no poetry occurs). Rosie, twenty years younger and still working as a teacher to support him. Poseidon (Sid) and Cassiopeia (Cassie), their children. Sid's partner, Jacquie, pregnant and very patient with Rosie's grumbles about George. Brenda, with whom George is now living. The intro swiftly sums up the background - George's defection on that fateful night in June 2016, first to Leave in the Referendum and then to Brenda, the looming threat of financial fraud and the assurance that this isn't a book where good and bad get their just desserts and that there aren't actually any good guys here, just people with mixed up motives and different sides to them.

While useful in orienting us to the characters and where they are, I found this synopsis a little surprising and part of me, throughout the book, was ruminating on it, trying to see whether I agreed or not. Was it meant to be taken seriously? Was it a bit of sly misdirection? I'm still not sure whether that was the intended effect although I have to say it probably made me pay closer attention and That can't be a bad thing.

Indeed, close attention is merited because in discussing Rosie, George, Brenda and the rest, Lewycka is - overtly - dissecting the Brexity turmoil of the past three years in Britain. One can almost assign roles. Brenda is Leave - strident, proudly non PC. Rosie is Remain - disappointed, puzzled and, increasingly, angry. George is perhaps Everyman - tilting Leave at the last minute but for reasons that depart from the official script. And Sid, Jacquie and Cassie are, Sid muses, those who will have to put things back together in the future years and decades.

On this reading, though, Lewycka isn't even-handed but makes it clear she thinks George is a fool. The overt plot in this book focuses on a complicated piece of identity theft which draws him in. It's a far from obvious scam which involves several different factions and has some genuinely funny moments, but despite this it's clear there is something fishy going on. It is hard not to join the dots to interpret George's Leave vote as a the result of another complex scam (aided perhaps by the book's title) so - despite that intro - I think we know where we are in terms of Brexit Britain.

All that said, there is a great deal more to this book, a lot of gentle comedy laced with  misunderstandings (all round), jealousy (between Brenda and Rosie) and incompetence (the scamming crooks who are onto George). And I think Lewycka does well giving voice to the sense of hurt that many of us have ('It's the closeness of the result, it's the feeling of being cheated, it's the sense that the other side it being wilfully stupid and just doesn't understand the issue...')

It has heart, too, as Sid ponders his future relationship with Jacquie and their child. I found this very moving - Sid and Jacquie are well drawn characters, Sid, a maths lecturer, with 'Noether's theorem in his mind' (Emmy Noether deserves wider recognition!), Jacquie who is 'such a sympathetic listener that Rosie prefers talking to her, rather than to Sid...' They would, perhaps, be easy to overlook give all the hullabaloo from the others. And after a lot of setup in the opening three quarters, the book shifts up a few gears and gives us quite a different ending from what we might expect. In doing that, things suddenly move very fast, with the book covering - literally a great deal of ground in relatively few pages. I'd have welcomed more time, and detail, in this section.

There is some great, sly writing hereg: a song sung, with variations, by, among other groups 'Angela and the Muttis' and 'The Blue-Eyed Barnier Boy', the description of a certain politician: 'He's a dangerous demagogue, with his populist posturing and and mendacious mouth grinning open like a frog waiting too catch some innocent fly with his fast flicking tongue.' (Who COULD it be?). 'What is national identity', we are asked rhetorically, 'but victimhood with boots on?' More earthily - here is a kiss: 'Her lips taste of secrecy and forest chestnuts...'

As much a commentary on contemporary Britain - well, England - as Lewycka's previous books, this is a thoroughly good read. Perhaps the intro reflects the impossibility of trying to exist - to live or two write - in our current climate without taking a position while at the same time being told to get over it, move forward, unify, something which seems impossible and has to be cast forward to future generations.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Middle England (Rotters' Club, 3)
Jonathan Coe
Penguin, 8 November 2018
HB, 421pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley

Middle England is a return to characters Coe introduced in The Rotters' Club (which followed their lives as teenagers in 70s Birmingham) and returned to in The Closed Circle (focussing on the years of Blairite pomp at the beginning of the century). Opening in 2010 with the run-up to the General Election and continuing to Autumn 2018 (i.e. now!) this is very much Coe's Brexit novel, suitably titled as an enquiry into England's (not Britain's) character and ghosts - literally, a "condition of England novel".

That makes the book very contemporary (except where, I imagine due to publishing deadlines, it's not able to take in the latest developments in the unfolding story - such as the criminal investigation into the Leave campaign which would have fitted very well with the final third of the book). Thankfully, it's not a moment-by-monent account and the accent is very much on the response and behaviour of Coe's usual wide cast of characters, muddling along with their lives as they always have.

Revisiting the world of those earlier books also means a return to what are for me some beloved characters, people I really feel I've got to know. Central here is Benjamin Trotter, with his love of music, and his sister Lois, still - forty years on - haunted by her experience of one of the Birmingham pub bombings. We also meet Lois's daughter Sophie, and Doug, the radical journalist who married a wealthy heiress and has a daughter, Coriander, who despises him. And many more. Coe has a very good technique for handling his characters - we dip in and out of lives, sometimes skipping months or a year, sometimes following a particular incident or series of events (Sophie's cruise to the Baltic, delivering lectures on the history of art to a boatload of pensioners; Doug's meetings with Nigel, the baffling Assistant Deputy Director of Government Communications under the Cameron government). It's a bit like throwing a handful of leaves into the stream to help picture the flow - in their encounters with students, friends, enemies, family and workmates we get a cross section of, well, Middle England.

There's Colin, Benjamin and Lois's father. At the start of the book, their mum Sheila has just dies and it's clear that Colin will never recover from that. But as the years pass, he does;t just mourn, he broods, over how the country has changed - whether it's immigration ('I don't think I heard a word of English spoken on the way here'), loss of industry or "political correctness" (a common complaint of characters here, at least those of a Brexitish turn of mind).

There's Helen, Sophie's mother-in-law, who astounds and shocks Sophie by harking back to Enoch Powell (but of course Sophie doesn't challenge this: a long and awkward pause on the car journey ensures).

There's Charlie, a long-lost friend of Benjamin's, who's trying to make a living as a children's entertainer while supporting his girlfriend Yasmin and her daughter Aneeqa.

Through the comings and goings, crossed paths and life events, Coe weaves a picture of a deeply uneasy country taking a long look at itself and deciding it doesn't like what it sees. There is a degree of rage, perhaps the realisation of loss of privilege and the frustration is pushed this way and that, finally to be vented on  23 June 2016. There is also - through the subplot with Nigel - the story of vain and stupid politicians who didn't realise, or chose not to see, what they were unleashing. There is nostalgia (a golf club that seems fixed in the 50s) and - Coe has a gift for portraying this - the little nuances of English racism played out in (mainly) everyday moments, almost gone before they're spotted and rarely or never the occasion of any rebuke.

Wrapping round the book are the words of a folk song, credited to Shirley Collins, a haunting ballad telling of lost good times and diminished circumstances ("Adieu to old England, adieu/ And adieu to some hundreds of pounds/ If the world had been ended when I had been young/ My sorrows I'd never have known") . Combined with Benjamin's taste for the elegiac in music and some wistful passages towards the end looking back to his and Lois's childhood ("Beacon Hill. The landscape of his own childhood. Tobogganing in the winter...") and of course the part of the country - the east Midlands - where much of the story is set, there is an almost Housman-like sense of nostalgia and of a lost world.  Coe punctures this by having Benjamin point to this as, in a sense, nostalgia for a world that never was but he also cannily uses it to show the very real sense of loss and bewilderment felt by so many at their place in the modern world (Colin, literally lost when he visits the side of the old Longbridge car works). More ominously, Coe shows how that sense of loss - not in itself a malign thing - is worked upon and manipulated by those with an agenda.

Throughout this the theme of different Englands emerges, of a lack of comprehension and shared experience. ("Just as Doug had told him, 'People are getting angry, really angry' even if they could not have explained why, or with whom.") Whether causing a malicious complaint against an academic for their treatment of a student, a violent, racist assault in a small English village or the breakup of a marriage, Coe seems to be saying that we just can't live with each other any longer - an ironic reversal of something he has a French celebrity author say towards the start of this book: 'The French are an intolerant, judgemental people. Not like the British, I think". Perhaps that reputation for tolerance - whether deserved or not - is another aspect of the lost "old England" to which we have sadly bid Adieu.

So this is in many ways a mournful novel, even if often funny. Coe isn't, I think, pointing out anything that hasn't been said or debated in the aftermath of the 2016 Referendum, but he does the subject the courtesy of a scrutiny from all angles (even if it's clear where his sympathies lie). He does suggest that, in the end, some of the divisions may be healed. I think though that if there is to be a fourth book in the Rotters sequence, bringing things to a real reconciliation, it will have to be another few decades in the making - and I'm unlikely to see it written.

Strongly recommended, even if uncomfortable reading at times.