Author Marina Lewycka
Following-up a successful first novel can be an overwhelming proposition for many writers — just ask To Kill a Mocking Bird’s Harper Lee. The combination of heightened expectations and pressure to quickly churn out a follow-up can leave a novice novelist either crippled by doubt or prodded into producing sub-par prose. Marina Lewycka, however, has sidestepped the sophomore slump with her second novel, Strawberry Fields (Viking Canada, 294 pp.).
Lewycka’s debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a sharply examined exploration of family and ethnicity, succeeds where others have failed by revisiting themes explored in earlier work while consciously crafting a distinctive style and tone for the story. Where A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian told the tale of two feuding sisters’ attempts to save their elderly father from his disastrous marriage to a Ukrainian émigré, Strawberry Fields is a much more ambitious exploration of the immigrant experience.
Reached by telephone at her home in Sheffield, England, the British novelist of Ukrainian origin explained the reason she felt compelled to tell this particular story in her second novel. “It’s partly wanting to take a look at the world through the eyes of the people at the bottom of the heap, really, which is a long tradition in literature. People who are marginal, who are outsiders, often have very interesting perceptions.”
The down-and-out outsiders of Strawberry Fields are migrant workers from Eastern Europe, Africa and China, working in the strawberry fields of England. Lewycka cycles confidently through her stable of narrators, weaving their story threads into a vibrant tapestry. From the gruff Polish field boss Yola, to the Bob Dylan-loving Thomaz, to Malawian naïf Emanuel, everybody gets their chance to spin a yarn — even the mangy mongrel that they end up adopting.
While this narrative approach is occasionally unwieldy and makes it difficult to follow certain characters, it allows Lewycka the opportunity to show off her pitch-perfect ability to replicate the many ways that these foreigners abuse the English language. “Certainly foreigners who learn English often do learn a sort of very formal, slightly archaic form of the language, and they all have slightly different ways of doing it wrong,” she says. But for all that, she is willing to playfully capture her narrators’ linguistic missteps, also excelling at capturing the rare beauty that they frequently stumble upon.
It isn’t until the workers are forced to flee the strawberry fields and begin a journey across the English countryside that Lewycka starts exploring the role of migrant labour in English society. Recruiters for shady employment agencies and willfully ignorant employers become villainous, as the latter-day pilgrims travel from strawberry fields to industrial chicken farms to big city restaurants. Against this backdrop unfolds what is perhaps the novel’s most compelling storyline, the romance between bright-eyed Orange revolutionary Irina and her proudly communistic countryman Andriy. These two, born into wildly different socio-economic situations, find themselves falling in love in England.
It is perhaps telling that the story was originally published in the United Kingdom as Two Caravans, a title that was deemed “too English” by the North American publishers. This is a story mired in place, concerned with issues of English identity and what that means in an age of mass migration. And yet, Lewycka says that this story resonates whether one is from Coventry or Calgary. “I think that it’s local in the sense that it’s obviously about a particular locality, but it’s very much about the world that we live in now.”
