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: The Lubetkin Legacy by Marina Lewycka

The Lubetkin Legacy
Marina Lewycka
Penguin Fig Tree, 5 May 2016
HB, 386pp

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

Berthold Sidebottom (yes, really) is a "resting" actor in his 50s who can't help comparing himself, bitterly, with George Clooney. Berthold had a wife, a daughter, a life - but now he's lost all of them and is back living at home with his elderly mother, Lily.

Lily is a redoubtable character, an old campaigner ("don't mourn, organise!" exclaims her parrot at one point) who fought for a better world - a world exemplified by the flat she still, just about, clings onto. Part of a block built by the visionary architect Berthold Lubetkin ("nothing is too good for ordinary people") in an age of benevolent municipal socialism, the flat is now threatened by the Bedroom Tax, Right-To-Buy and various iffy deals centred on the local planning department.

But then Lily is taken off, first to hospital ("How had this sudden change come about? It had crept up on her so gradually that I had not noticed the point at which my indomitable mother had become a frail old lady") and then to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns (Berthhold is inclined to quote Shakespeare) and her son left alone to deal with the DWP, the Housing Department, and relatives keen to snaffle the flat. He bounces between the various powers that would see him out on the street and we gradually learn more about his own circumstances (tragic wouldn't be over the top as a description of them) and his family background (descended from a line of agitators and trade unionists and from a mother who had three very different husbands).  Berthold is far from hapless, cooking up a plan to block the bureaucracy he can see coming to dispossess him, but is hampered by the complexities of Lily's love-life (was she actually married to all those husbands? Did Lubetkin really promise her the flat? And how do Berthold's ne'er-do-well half brother and crazy sisters fit into the picture?)

As if that wasn't enough, Lewycka introduces Inna, Lily's Ukrainian neighbour in hospital, who agrees  to impersonate Lily to prevent Berthold losing the flat. Via her, Berthold comes to understand about the (also tragic) history of Ukraine. But Inna has her own train of dodgy connections - and her own agenda (what's really in the Ukrainian delicacies she keeps feeding him?)

But there's more! Newly arrived in the same block is Violet, a young woman of mixed UK and Kenyan background who's just started her first job in the City, in "Wealth Preservation". She's rapidly introduced to a shady world of offshore transactions, transfer pricing fraud and corruption ("Now at the end of her first month she is wondering whether she has chosen the wrong career") which parallels the goings on at Madeley Court.

Throw in a threatened cherry orchard, an incompetent funeral director's ("Wrest 'n' Piece") and a supporting cast of diverse neighbours, and one soon begins to reel at the sheer breadth of the book. Lewycka remains in command - just - of all this material, but I could have wished for slightly less at times. I felt there was enough of a meaty plot in Berthold's difficulties without a parallel African corruption scandal and that it was a shame the Kenyan angle seemed to serve mainly to highlight corruption, which seems a slightly stereotyped view of Africa. Put another way, Violet herself is one of the best realised and most sympathetic characters in the book, (Berthold being rather self-absorbed, not to say self-pitying, though he has his reasons) walking a tightrope between her European and African heritages, tying to find where she belongs, trying to do the right thing. A story about her alone would also be quite enough for a whole book. Put together, there seems to be a little too much going on.

It is a very funny book at many points, sharply observed - here's Berthold on Violet: "I knew I must take things slowly... a lovely girl like that is always surrounded by men wanting to get her into bed. Not me. I was different. I was caring, sensitive, a big soul, a good conversationalist, a good listener, a good neighbour and friend, a good... whatever it took." The humour is, as that example shows, frequently dark, the humour of people in impossible situations simply trying to get by ("What use history... in history, everybody slightly dead"). On the other hand, at times the commentary can be rather heavy handed, rather labouring parallels between the doings of the 'oliharki' in Russia and Ukraine, the scam that Violet's boss draws her into, the Kenyan corruption and the dodgy dealing in the Town Hall.

Overall, the book is perhaps at risk in places of throwing too much material at the reader, but nevertheless it's very entertaining and certainly thought provoking.