We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
Satire
is a tricky beast. Make it too harsh and bitter and you reveal a lack of
sympathy for the human species. Make it too soft and sentimental and it loses
all point as satire. I suppose there has to be an element of savagery in satire
– it is, after all, telling us that some human beings are fools – but there
also has to be something one can identify with. Isn’t satire supposed to
“reform manners”? It can do this only if it suggests there is something worth
reforming.
I’m
in two minds about the success of Marina Lewycka’s Various Pets Alive and Dead as satire. To cut to the chase, it is a “good read”, it hits some
targets spot on and it has some moments of genuine hilarity. But it goes a
little diffuse and cuddly before the last pages, as if the author is reassuring
us that’s she’s only kidding and doesn't mean any offence.
The
basic set-up is this. With her partner Marcus (whom she never married) Doro,
now in her sixties, brought up her kids Clara and Serge on an
anarcho-Marxist-hippie commune just outside dismal Doncaster in the 1970s and
1980s. It was the type of place where lentils were usually on the menu, care of
children was supposed to be a communal concern, marriage was frowned on as
bourgeois, there was much talk of the coming revolution and much swapping of
sexual partners. Newborn kids were lumbered with names like Ulyana and
Kollontai and the red flag was waved ostentatiously for local miners who (in
the 1970s and 80s) were suffering Thatcherite closure of their pits.
But try as they might, the
communards remained middle-class dreamers to their fingertips. Whenever they
contacted the real proles, the proles either saw them as soft touches for cash
or as people to exploit for their naivete.
Doro has an epiphany one day in
the commune in which she realizes:
“…she couldn’t help being thoroughly and undeniably middle class…. So
were all of them, in their thoughts, their habits, their tastes and
preferences. The fact that they’d just gone off picketing didn’t alter that one
iota. Did any of the [working-class] women
in the soup kitchen wear dungarees or read George Eliot or eat vegetarian mush?
Although they’d lived up here on the fringes of this working-class community
for fifteen years, they’d barely touched its inner life.” (Pg.81)
Doro solves this dilemma at the
time by smoking a joint, which says something else about the intellectual
weaknesses of the commune ethos.
Out of this mush, the inevitable
happened. Doro’s children Clara and Serge grew up to loathe and despise the
fact that they had nothing of their own; that their parents didn’t show them
any more regard than they showed other kids in the commune; and that they were
constantly surrounded by the smells of unwashed bodies and the jealousies and
bullying of other unsupervised kids. At the first opportunity they escaped the
commune and everything to do with it, and turned their backs on the things
their parents stood for.
Well,
almost.
At
the time the main plot unfolds (2007 and 2008) Clara has long since tired of
being “a prototype of a new kind of human
being – the torch-bearer of the non-bourgeois, non-private, non-nuclear
non-monogamous non-competitive non-violent society they’d set out to create…”
(Pg.94) She is now an elementary school teacher trying her best to nurture
proletarian kids, which is at least something her mother would have approved
of. But Clara also insists on having a clean and tidy flat of her own which she
doesn’t wish to share with anyone, and indulging in harmless pleasures such as
gourmet foods which her parents would have seen as decadent luxuries.
Meanwhile
Serge has turned 180 degrees away from any collectivist ideals. The genius of
the family, he is supposed to be doing a PhD in Mathematics at Cambridge, to
which he won a scholarship. But, unbeknown to his parents, he has absconded to
London and become a number-cruncher for an investment firm, making fortunes for
his dodgy bosses by devising the mathematical formulae that will allow them to
profit from plunging markets. In short, he is a prize capitalist exploiter.
We see in close-up the way he is
seduced by young City financier types:
“They laugh and he laughs too, suddenly engulfed in a warm gloopy wave
of at-oneness with his beautiful young, high-flying free-floating no-baggage
global elite, whose title is wealth, whose passport is brains, whose nation is
money.” (Pg.61)
Thus
the set-up. Dreamy collectivist hippie parents of the 1970s turning out
money-obsessed individualist kids. From Flower Power (with a light dash of
feminism and Marxism) to worship of The Market. The hilarity of seeing an
upbringing producing the exact opposite of what was intended.
Except
that Marina Lewycka is too shrewd to leave the novel on that level. After all,
exposing the shortcomings of old hippie communes isn’t exactly hot news, is it?
At a certain point we realize that, for all her ideological fuzziness, Doro is
a more humane person than her City son. And we can’t help sympathising with
some of her tastes:
“Doro has a long list of things she disapproves of, including
consumerism, racism, war, Botox, Jeremy Clarkson and trans-fatty acids. Maybe
bankers have been added already; if not, it can only be a matter of time.”
(Pg.19)
Old communes were partly a
composed of unrealistic nonsense, but they had at least the grain of an idea in
their hopes for the social good. As grey-haired Marcus still tries to type out
yet another Marxist tract, and as grey-haired Doro joins yet another demo
against a commercial take-over of local farming allotments, we smile
indulgently, but we know that they are better people than the son who kids
himself that there is nothing immoral in making and breaking business firms
simply for the sake of the financial rake-off. The processes of Serge’s
self-deception are viewed with sharp irony:
“He won’t let himself
get seduced into that life of aimless consumption, fetishisation of high-value
objects, partying to oblivion, life ruled by P&L, body-rhythms ruled by
uppers and downers. He wants money not to acquire stuff but to buy freedom –
the escape to the modest beach house in Brazil…..Okay, so he might also have a
nice suit or two.” (Pg.165)
Elements
of the plot do weight our sympathy towards Doro’s point of view (especially her
devoted care for Clara’s and Serge’s Downs Syndrome younger sibling
“Oolie-Anna”, which becomes more and more important as the novel progresses).
Doro is really the main character and certainly the novel’s moral centre. Clara
is a little redundant in terms of plot development and her tribulations at the
trendy elementary school, amusing in themselves, blunt the satire somewhat.
Marina Lewycka is at her best in puncturing the financial whizz-kid’s
pretensions and in holding up to ridicule some current social attitudes. A
particular sting is that the most materialistic of Serge’s thoroughly
materialistic colleagues is the Russian girl he lusts after, a citizen of the
former Soviet Union who wryly reminds him that communism merely succeeded in
turning Russia’ current masters into the most ruthless of buccaneer
capitalists.
I
do not want to talk this enjoyable novel up too much. It’s a brisk, efficient,
funny popular novel, not a great and penetrating work of literature. The
narrative structure is clever, cutting between the characters’ present lives
and their memories of the old commune, which allows us bit by bit to learn of
the traumas that drove them away. (Some of which involved the sudden death of
beloved pets – thus giving the novel its title). Its two major weaknesses are
its rather lame and forgiving ending, which does not resolve all the loose
ends; and Marina Lewycka’s unhappy way with physical farce.
There are a number of scenes
which are meant to be uproariously funny but which are not as good as their
set-ups – escaped classroom hamster wreaking havoc as it is chased around
elementary school; zealous wimmin’s meeting called to denounce the patriarchy
being disrupted by cussing , smoking prole woman and crude bloke who pees in
the fire; horny office attempts at love-making being interrupted by the
cleaning lady etc. etc.
The novel’s better social attire
is worthy of less clichéd knockabout. But this doesn’t stop Various Pets Alive and Dead from being a
fun read.
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