The fun of the feud

Marina Lewycka, whose A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian is a dark comedy about family feuding

12 April 2012

When Marina Lewycka's novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was first published earlier this year, some book shops shelved it in their agriculture sections.

You can understand the mistake: as titles go, it hardly shouts: "Read me! I'm a dark comedy!" Not that this matters a bit now. Last Monday morning, Lewycka found out that the novel - her first - had been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

"It's wonderful," she says, nibbling on a slice of panettone as if to keep herself from fainting with happiness. "But you see, being published still seems like such a luxury to me. Nothing will ever be as exciting as that moment when my agent called."

Her book tells the story of a feuding Anglo-Ukrainian family, whose lives are tipped upside down by the arrival of Valentina, a gold-digging hussy with breasts like "twin warheads", a passion for ready-prepared meals - "I cook modern way" - and an urgent need for a British passport.

Valentina is determined to marry the eccentric, widowed Nikolai, father of the novel's narrator, Nadia - and, since there is no fool like an old fool, this is a plan with which he is prepared to go along. But Valentina faces an implacable enemy in Nadia and her sister, Vera, who are determined to see off this cuckoo in their midst before she puts their father into an early grave.

Lewycka is the daughter of Ukrainian refugees - she was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the war - so the obvious question to ask is: how much of this is autobiographical? She laughs.

"Well, my father is eccentric and, like Nikolai, he has written a book about tractors." But he didn't marry a blonde with rocket-shaped breasts? "Er, not quite." What about her sister? In the novel, Nadia is a bleeding-heart liberal who finds her principles slipping away in the battle for her father, while Vera is as tough as old boots (they begin by despising one another; Valentina brings them together). "That part of the book is not at all as it is in life."

Lewycka has been writing since she was a child, but it was not until her forties - she is now 58 - that she finished a novel. "I sent it to everybody, but no one wanted it. It was so mortifying."

Her lucky break came when she joined a creative writing course at Sheffield Hallam University, where she lectures in media studies. "I was on the course as part of staff development. If I'd had to pay, I would never have done it. Our novels were sent out to an external examiner, who also happened to be an agent." He rang, told her how much he admired hers, and sold it that weekend.

She has two versions of her own beginning - one from her father, the other from her mother. "As I understand it, when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, they took a lot of able-bodied people to labour camps. My parents were part of that. At the end of the war, they met up through the Red Cross. I was the product of their reunion.

They came to England because the part of Germany they were in was liberated by the British. They were lucky not to be sent back to the Ukraine. My father was from the east of the country and, under the terms of the Churchill-Stalin pact, people from the east should have been sent back. My mother was from the west, and my father managed to persuade them that they were together. But, even once they were living here, he was convinced someone would find out and cart him off."

It was only while writing her novel that she discovered that she still had an aunt and cousins in the Ukraine; they got in touch after she put a notice on a Russian family website. She is soon to visit them. "It's unnerving. Like stepping into the pages of my own book."

Lewycka has no idea precisely how old she was when the family arrived in Britain; her parents never talked about the war, and she never asked, sensing it was taboo. Was she aware, after she pitched up at her Home Counties primary school, that her parents were different from other people's, eating borscht and speaking a strange language?

"I knew from the start. We were the first generation of immigrants, before people came from the Caribbean. I got picked on. They call it dual heritage now: you're one person with your friends, another with your family. It gives an outsider perspective."

She says she feels more involved with the immigration debate than ever before, for all that she has always thought of herself as very English.

"I've started thinking, hey, maybe they mean me. There's a new stridency.

My over-riding impression, even as a toddler, was how nice people were. People would give us things. I remember my mother tearing her hair out. 'They've given us all these socks, and they didn't wash them,' she said. The reason they were kind to us wasn't just that they felt sorry for us; it was that they thought, we, the English, are a kind people. I'd hate it if that was to change."

A Short History of Tractors touches on all this, without being an "issue" novel - just to make things more cloudy, Valentina, a new immigrant, is thoroughly disreputable. "Yes, she is. But immigrants are no different to anyone else. Some are nasty, some heroic." She grins. "In any case, a novel needs a good villain."

After university, Lewycka moved to London, where she went on marches and lived in a commune (it was the Sixties, after all). Her parents, having fled Communism, were horrified. "It was a bit sordid. When my mother visited, she would come down the stairs with a dustpan and brush."

She met her husband, a trade unionist, when he passed through this commune; they have a daughter. I wonder how she feels about her literary success - the fact that it has come to her relatively late.

"You do know more as you get older," she says. "When I was younger, I was a bit earnest. I thought writing could change the world. I'm jollier now. I couldn't have written a humorous book before."

Her plan now is to find a way of working less and writing more. Well, if she wins the Orange Prize, the university will have to be flexible. She smiles. She isn't saying if she thinks she'll win. From here on in, anything else is just a bonus.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is published by Viking at £12.99.

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