11 Sep 2013 03:36:40
At least, that's the stereotype. So when a Hungarian marries a diffident Englishwoman, has a daughter and then runs off, leaving the Englishwoman a financial hostage to her in-laws, all sorts of complicated mittel-European issues arise.
When Charlotte Mendelson's new novel Almost English begins, Marina is 16 and steadily miserable at a mixed boarding school somewhere in the home counties. Her mother, Laura, is living under the benign tyranny of three elderly Hungarians and having an entirely unrewarding affair with her boss, the local doctor.
Marina's boyfriend, Guy Viney, is from the year below. His father Alexander is on the telly and knows an unusual amount about the culture and history of the Carpathian mountains. Marina is persecuted both by her fellow students and by a homesickness so debilitating it almost blinds her. Meanwhile Laura finds herself covertly back in touch with her husband, meeting him in secret in places far away from his own relations, plagued by an equally powerful longing for her estranged daughter.
Inevitably, it is the Hungarians who take over the novel, bounding through London like wolfhounds, exotic and magnificent and just a little bit sinister. To their neighbours in "Vest-min-stair Court" they seem incomprehensibly foreign, preoccupied with inedible foods and business empires built from corrective undergarments. Somehow the shadow of the war still seems to fall over them in a way that it doesn't over the English.
This portrait is drawn in part from Mendelson's own experience as the granddaughter of "Trans-Carpathian-Ruthenian former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who were born in what is now the Ukraine, learned their sums in Russian, spoke Hungarian together yet considered themselves Czech". The rich history of that background infuses the novel, as pungent and startling as walnut cake.
Mendelson's novels inhabit similar territory to those of Maggie O'Farrell, with the same capacity for extreme noticing, the same profound emotional intelligence shaping the characters and driving the narrative. But Mendelson's world is sharper, her sense of the world a little more cynical. Almost English has been longlisted for this year's Booker; it deserves to win for the quality of the writing alone.
If it has a flaw, it's Mendelson's later pursuit of the least interesting characters. Alexander Viney is revealed as a cad, but when has there ever been a fictional TV personality who wasn't? His son Guy, who initially looks much more promising, vanishes from view. Peter, the errant husband, sidles back, ghostly and incomplete. The boarding school's malign rituals and exclusions begin to take on a life of their own. The Hungarian relatives have plenty to say, but nothing much to do.
The other problem is the similarity between the two main characters. Both Laura and Marina are nervous, self-conscious, over-scrupulous about what they say and where they place themselves physically, and secretly envious of the Hungarians' bullet-proof incapacity for embarrassment. That lack of differentiation between mother and daughter sometimes makes for comedy, but often feels uncomfortably same-ish.
That said, Almost English is still a delight. Beautifully written, warm, funny and knowing, it manages to seize an entire slice of Europe for itself, a vast empire full of new and interesting questions about how close, and how far apart, all these postwar worlds have made us. Above all, it is written with love. And good food.
