Monday, August 12, 2013
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson, review
Charlotte Mendelson has said that she's drawn to dysfunctional families with secrets. Her fourth novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize, harvests more strange fruit from this fertile soil.
The Farkases are dysfunctional in a way that recalls fairy tales or Roald Dahl's children's books: an all-female household comprising three pensioners, an abandoned wife and a teenage girl squeezed into a tiny flat "in the barely respectable depths of Bayswater". The scene is set for high domestic drama, even before you learn that the elderly sisters are "fur-wrapped" Hungarians whose loud, vampish voices are dusted with "snow and fir and darkness".
Laura is the English daughter-in-law of one of the sisters, tied in this bizarre living arrangement by "a knot of guilt and duty and financial embarrassment". The narrative alternates between Laura and her 16-year-old daughter, Marina, as they experience a parallel coming of age over the first months of 1988.
Marina, the "almost English" girl of the title, is at Combe Abbey, a Dorset boarding school in whose quintessentially English setting she feels suddenly foreign. She is there on borrowed money, under strict instructions to get into Cambridge and become a doctor. Instead, she develops an identity crisis and a deeply inappropriate crush from which all manner of calamities flow.
Marina is an excruciatingly authentic adolescent: self-obsessed, self-loathing and crashingly gauche in adult company. There are exquisitely embarrassing moments both in her stumbling adventures and in her mother's.
This is a very funny novel, dancing close to farce without ever mistreating its characters. Even Laura, who has hit her forties while avoiding adulthood, is drawn with great tenderness. It is Laura and Marina's story, but the Hungarian sisters have several scene-stealing turns.
Reading Mendelson's easy, assured prose is like sinking into something soft and velvety. You almost sigh with pleasure. Occasionally, her lightness of touch works against her: shocking revelations are made in such a serene tone that the horror doesn't quite hit home. Some might also find fault with the male characters, most of whom are really just ciphers. But this is such a warm book, my advice is simply to sit back and enjoy it.
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
288pp, Mantle, Telegraph offer price: £12.49 (plus p&p) 0844 871 1515 (rrp £16.99)
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2fd6ef9b/sc/10/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cbooks0Cfictionreviews0C10A2333680CAlmost0EEnglish0Eby0ECharlotte0EMendelson0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
