At times laugh-out-loud funny,
at times touching and at times disturbing, Monica Lewycka's novel is
not what you might expect. Nominated for the Booker Prize, it lacks
the gravitas of novels more usually associated with literary awards;
yet, although looking unmistakably like chick-lit in its binding and
promotion, there is more depth to it than you'll find in any Jane
Green-ite.
The premise is deceptively
simple. Pappa, an 84-year-old, recently widowed, Ukrainian
immigrant falls in love with a flash, brash and breast-enhanced
floozy from his homeland, fifty years his junior. She, for her part,
wants the luxurious life of a westerner with the colour co-ordinated
kitchen, the private school education for her genius son and the top
prize of a British passport. To the chagrin of his two adult
daughters, Pappa marries Valentina and takes her and her son,
Stanislav into his home. But all is far from rosy in the English
idyll. Pappa can't support Valentina in the style to which she
wishes to become accustomed and Valentina can't stop her flirty
affairs with other men. The two daughters, who haven't been on
speaking terms since the death of their mother, are re-united in
their efforts to save their father and oust Valentina in his
affections.
Simple, so far? Well, yes. And
no. The portrait of Pappa, with his conflicts between love and
loneliness, between lust and old age, between loyalty towards his
daughters and his desire for a new and vital existence with the
larger than life Valentina is beautifully drawn. And Valentina, with
her green satin bras, foul-mouthed pigeon English and apparent
obsession with materialism eventually demands as much sympathy as
derision. To some degree both are stereo-typical but that only
serves to make the understanding of their complex and very human
desires all the more poignant. Pappa's fascination with the history
of tractors - itself mildly interesting - is wonderfully
juxtapositioned against the very practical concerns of sex, money,
immigration and divorce and the occasional, short extracts from his
book on the topic underline the wastefulness of the war which
ravaged Ukraine, and the rest of Europe, in the mid 20th century, so
forcefully highlighted as Vera and Nadia, his two daughters, explore
together their family history and the reasons for their
differences..
A Short History of Tractors in
Ukrainian is a quirky, enjoyable and easy read but in the end one
can't escape the conclusion that Lewycka has just tried to do too
much, to address too many themes, in the space of 300 odd pages. The
overall effect therefore leaves a sense that the humour is
inappropriate within such deep issues and the commentary on social
conditions is undermined by the humour. It's a shame that the reader
is almost made to feel guilty about chortling along with such a
range of wonderfully comic characters. It's just too ambitious. It
almost works, but not quite.
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