BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed by
SHERIDAN GRISWOLD | Friday August 3, 2007 00:00

Marina Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in 1946 in Kiel, Germany. Her family was able to migrate to England. She studied at Keele University, She currently teaches media studies at Sheffield Hallam University. Between 1993 and 2002, Lewycka wrote seven books to assist caregivers, particularly those working with the aged. Then with a failed novel on hand, and following a course in creative writing at her university, she turned to her roots and wrote a comic novel, 'The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' (2005), about sibling rivalry and two sisters trying to manipulate their father's affair at 84 with a dashing woman of 36. It won the comic fiction prize at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, making her the first female winner.

It also won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction and made the Man Booker Prize long list. Her novel was no longer shelved under 'Agriculture'. It is soon to be made into a movie.

'Two Caravans' is bound to be equally as successful. It has a rousing cast of characters revolving around Irina Blazkho and Andriy Palenko. Irina is 19 and determined to make her own way in the world and learn English while at it. She is a modern young woman from Kiev, Ukraine, whose father, a professor, has run off with a younger woman. She also wants to escape her mother's clutches - her mother is already hysterical 'about all the things that go wrong for Ukrainian girls who go West'. Irina's reply: 'Everyone knows these things only happened to stupid and uneducated girls ... they're not going to happen to me.' But they do - having registered at a college and obtained her student papers and surrendered her passport and Seasonal Agricultural Worker papers to Mister Vulk.

At Dover she finds things are seldom what she had imagined. She is destined to be a strawberry picker in Kent, on Mr Leapish's holding where two caravans are set on the side of the hill, the larger one for the men, the smaller for the women. About Andriy she wonders how she could love 'a man riddled with Soviet-era ideas'.

Andriy is 25, a miner's son from Donbus, the coal centre of the Ukraine. When he was seven he visited Sheffield, England with his father and has retained romantic images of this international gathering of miners and the city. Later his father died in a tragic accident underground, while Andriy who was there with him survived; he is guilt-ridden and unsure of himself.

He has both humour and native intelligence and can see a scam from a long way away. He is attracted to Irina from the beginning. They have a prolonged dance around each other as neither can articulate what they feel for fear of rejection, plus a mix of attraction-repulsion syndrome and the way events conspire against them every time they are set to 'make a possibility'.

The other strawberry pickers are labelled 'Two Chinese Girls' (one is actually Song Ying and the other Soo Lai Bee), though they are very different; one is from China, the other from the Diaspora in Malaysia. They both are seeking their fortune in the West and met through the college where you don't have to attend classes but do have to pay fees. Also in the small caravan are Ciocia Yola, 39, and her niece Marta, 30, both from Poland and legal as it now belongs to the European Union (EU). Yola is having a 'secret' affair with the owner of the strawberry fields.

In the men's Caravan there is the upwardly mobile Vitaly, from somewhere in the former USSR, who is slick and out to exploit any opportunities in business that are available, from selling beer to selling girls and becoming a polished 'mobilfonman' who can shift fluently between many languages. Tomasz, also from Poland, is a 45-year-old hippy type who plays the guitar and has a crush on Yola, but his smelly feet seem to offend everyone.

To round out the men's caravan there is Emmanuel, who is nearly 18 and from Zomba. He is religious, has a gifted voice for singing church music, and writes letters to an older sister (their parents died of HIV and AIDS) who is a nurse somewhere in England. He hopes to find Toby McKenzie whose life he saved when McKenzie was on his gap year in Malawi. Emmanuel's letters to his sister convey both his insights and misunderstanding of what is happening around him. He eventually becomes a fisher of men.

Into this chaos arrives Dog, having escaped the clutches of some men in Kent who use stolen dogs for fights and gambling. Dog and Andriy bond after he nurses Dog back to good health. Dog, they discover in Richmond is a 'Labrador collie, I'd say, with a bit of German shepherd in there too. Excellent cross. Best dogs you can get' (page 186). Dog's musing are recorded in capital letters and without punctuation: 'I am a dog I am a sad dog my man is in love with this more-stupid than-sheep female his voice is thick and soft and his piss is cloudy he stinks of love hormones she stinks of love hormones  too soon they will mate he will have no love for dog I am a sad dog I am dog' (page 250).
This novel is a wondrous tale, like the best sweet onion, that keeps peeling to reveal even more luscious treats inside. After a spell in Dover some of our friends go to Amsterdam, while the hard core descend on Shermouth where they work in relation to the production of poultry for the British palate. Read this chapter and you'll never want to eat mass-produced chickens again. Tomasz wonders, 'whether the villagers know the horror that is happening on their doorstep'. It was said that villagers who lived near Treblinka had only a hazy idea of what was happening behind the barbed wire fence a few kilometres away. They, like the villagers of Tritchington, must have been bothered by the smell when the wind blew in a certain direction' (page 132).

The experience at Buttercup Meadow does drive three of them back to Poland, while the rest head for London to find the McKenzies and reveal the truth about strawberries. Emmanuel is left there and Dog, Irina and Andriy move on their way slowly and circuitously to Sheffield, including pauses working in a classy restaurant in London and staying with a group of whole earth preservers in The Peaks. Their most amazing interlude is with a Zambian nurse, Yateka, at an old folks' home. She is also a victim of all the deductions: tax, food, accommodation, uniform, training fee, agency fee - 'At the end of the week I have nothing left'.

All in all Two Caravans is another novel that once started you can't put down.
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