Three Monkeys Where tragedy, tractors and comedy meet. Marina Lewycka in interview.

While A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian is ostensibly a comedy, and an effective one at that, it's not without genre breaking moments, particularly in its portrayal of the aged. It's the story of an elderly Ukrainian widower, a naturalised British citizen, who finds love, in the form of an economic migrant with "superior Botticellian breasts", as told by his distraught daughter. At one point, the narrator comes to find her father trapped in his room, held at ransom by his blonde bride, and the description is bereft of the fluffy viewpoint one might expect from a comedy: "His glasses have slipped down his nose, and sit at a crazy angle. His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, showing the white hairs that sprout around his scar. He has a sour, unwashed smell. He isn’t exactly your Don Juan, but he has no idea"[pg 170]. "Old age is something we prefer not to think about, - says author Marina Lewycka, - or to look at too closely except through rose-tinted glasses. The way our society is organised, young people are often protected from the reality of the ageing process, and so it comes as quite a shock. And yes, it’s scary. And it happens to us all. Be warned". Prior to writing the novel, which has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize, Lewycka researched and wrote a number of books for Age Concern, during the research for which she encountered "some wonderful, dotty, smelly and bloody-minded old people, and their exasperated relatives".

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is a tender and funny book, but doesn't pull its punches. Some of the finest comic moments come from the lips of the Ukrainian characters, garbling their English in rage. Valentina, the blonde gold-digger, who explodes into the lives of the narrator and her father "like a fluffy pink grenade", angrily spills out classics like "No good meanie oral sex maniac husband". There's a tension in the comedy, not unlike that of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is illuminated, where the pidgeon English of the main characters (coincidentally Ukrainian) drives the laughter. Lewycka, of Ukrainian parentage herself, dismisses the notion though that perhaps the comedy is a patronising one, a comedy that serves to confirm stereotypes. "Patronising? Come on, what would life be if we weren’t allowed to laugh at human foibles?", she responds, continuing: "When I wrote the dialogue, I just wrote what came into my head, it all just came out, and looking back I realise that what I have done, very often, is to translate literally what someone would have said in Ukrainian into English. There is always a ‘clunkiness’ about translated language which can be quite funny. I love reading travel guides and tourist information written in English by people whose first language is not English, and who do just that – translate literally. But I also found that once you abandon the rules of ‘good English’, it gives you a tremendous freedom to play with the language, and to be more vivid and expressive than ‘good English’ will allow. "

The obscure title refers to a book within the book, being written by Nikolai the narrator's father, detailing the contribution of the humble tractor to modern Ukraine's violent history. Missing the point completely, a reviewer for the august Yorkshire Post mused that if the Booker prize had a category for most boring title ever Lewycka would win. In fact the curious and absurd title fits the book perfectly, drawing the reader into a strange and disconcerting world of human weaknesses. Lewycka was born to Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel in the aftermath of the Second World War, and her father has actually written a book on the history of tractors in Ukrainian, leading interviewers such as myself to splutter out "autobiographical?" eagerly. She's tactful in her response - "Many of the events started in autobiography, but as the characters took on a life of their own, and became distinct from the people in MY life, so they created their own stories" - though one could imagine that inwardly she must be heartily fed up of questions that dwell on her life rather than her fiction. "My father did write a history of tractors," she says of the title, "but his book is very different from mine. It is full of technical detail. But I thought the idea of someone writing this was so funny, and once I started looking into the world of tractor enthusiasts, I just got hooked. Tractors are like Mother: close to the earth, hardworking, and undervalued. They lack glamour, but they feed the human race, and they changed the world."

And what about the Ukraine? It's WWII and communist history is weaved throughout the story, but could it be just as easily interchanged with any Eastern European country? "Ukraine is a small country, - she answers, - most of whose history has been spent in the shadow of one imperial power or another. Ukrainians have never conquered anybody, or gone to war except in self defence (apart from the tragedy of internal strife). It is a rural country, dependent on agriculture, where most people live in villages or small towns, and are relatively unsophisticated. I think that does give us a peculiar innocence which we share with countries like Ireland and New Zealand. I tried to put that across especially in the ‘tractor’ episodes."

Before the shrewder of my compatriots rush out to write A Short History of Tractors as Gaeilge (indeed Ireland's Harry Ferguson gets a namecheck in the book for his contribution to the development of the tractor), take note. It's not as easy as it seems. Review after review, the vast majority praiseworthy, all point out the "craft" behind the novel. It's funny and moving, but also well written. Indeed it's funny and moving precisely because it's well written. Lewycka, who has written novels for over fifty years without being published, with her nomination for the Orange Prize will have single handedly doubled applications to creative writing courses throughout the UK, having herself earned an M.A. in creative writing. Can you be taught how to write a novel? Not necessarily. Lewycka is happy to admit the help she received (for example, her tutor reading an early draft of the novel pointed out that the subplot of the Ukrainian tractor book came into the story too late - " she was right – I was just being lazy and I thought I could get away with it. So I went right back to the beginning, and threaded the other stories in – the tractors, as well"), but, as she reasonably points out, "apart from that, and especially at the level of language, the craft is something I taught myself".

Where a creative writing course does come into its own is in putting new writers in contact with the publishing industry. "I think it’s very hard for a first time novelist to break through. I now realise that the point of writing courses is not so much that they teach you to write,- she says, - but that they put your writing in a space where it can be visible to editors and agents."

Dare we mention it again? A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, a prize set up for women authors. The importance of a shortlisting is in no doubt. It helps shine a spotlight on a book, and, aside from conferring merit, boosts sales. To what extent does Lewycka think a prize set for women authors is valid? Is it really harder for women to get published? To get the attention of the reading public? Her answer is instructive: "I don’t think it’s more difficult for women writers to get published, in fact it obviously isn’t. But maybe it’s more difficult to get taken seriously. But then I’m not sure I want to be taken seriously. In my earlier novels – the ones that weren’t published – I set out to change the world. In this one, I set out to delight and entertain; there are some serious ideas, but I tried to sneak them in almost so you wouldn’t notice." In terms of the actual prize, for the first time in the interview (conducted by email) she becomes demure: "I think people should view literary prizes as more like pulling a raffle ticket out of a hat, and less like beating everyone else in a race or a competition. Of course it’s nice to be selected for a list, because it means people have enjoyed your book, which is what it’s all about. But winning is neither here nor there."

Just as she's candid in her novel about the realities of age, she's also surprisingly up front about the fact that she's not a wünderkid new author. Writing in the Guardian about being a first-time author she said "'Kazuo Ishiguro worries about reaching 50 and you've [Lewycka] just started!". Traditionally one associates age, in terms of writers, with wisdom, and hence publishability, but that's for established (usually male) writers like the Philip Roths of this world. It's a very different matter for someone over fifty publishing their first novel: "It would be nice if age didn’t matter, but of course it does. I feel I have so many fewer writing years left. Less time to experiment and make mistakes. On the other hand you know much more when you’re older. And maybe you take yourself less seriously." It's not just a self-conscious difference though, it's an imposed difference coming from the publishing world. "well, - she says confidentially, - my advance wasn’t very fantastic, and when I asked for more my agent said that to get the six figure advances, you have to be young and beautiful. But they gave me a little more anyway. It pays to be cheeky!"

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has been chosen for the BBC's new literary discussion programme Page Turners. How important is the page turning factor for an author like Lewycka? "This ties in with the question about my age, and about the difficulty of getting a first novel published. You know, I have been writing for years – more than 50 years. I knew that this was my last chance: if this one didn’t get published, I’d have given up. So I gave it everything. And I knew that I really had just the first page to hook the publisher/agent/reader – and that if the reader put it down, I knew they might not pick it up again. That’s one answer to the question, but the other answer is that I wanted to write something that people would enjoy reading – we all love being gripped by a book."

Lewycka is an enthusiastic reader as well, though regrettably she finds less and less time to devote to fiction. Amongst her long list of favourite authors are names as diverse as Jonathan Coe, James Joyce, Anita Desai, Margaret Atwood and Zoe Heller. Her day job, until now, has been to lecture about PR at Sheffield Hallam University. It may seem an incongruous background for the author, but not so she contends: "actually, PR and fiction have much in common. PR is about making stories in which the ‘client’ features in some heroic role, often overcoming difficulties like Cinderella, beating the bad guy like Roy Rogers, facing up to powerful competition like David to Goliath, or being a ‘good fairy’ and waving a magic chequebook to bring joy to little children … etc etc etc. Increasingly, I want not to teach PR but to teach ABOUT PR – but I have to compromise. I want to teach about what is done to us, but my students want to learn how to do it. We live in a world which is saturated with promotional messages, the most effective of which are disguised as stories."

Just as we're bombarded by promotional messages disguised as stories, so, often, they can be political messages. One of the themes of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is immigration - both that of Nikolai and his family in post WWII Europe, and that of Valentina from post-communism Ukraine. Immigration is a subject that provokes all sorts of extreme reactions, and is often prone to scare mongering. Throughout the novel I was constantly expecting an episode that would change the perception of Valentina from that of a cruel, gold-digging dominatrix into something more human, but, contrary to formula, Lewycka doesn't really try to give us greater insight into her motives. There is a certain hesitant sympathy that builds in Nadia, the narrator, but in general terms Valentina remains an unredeemed character. This gave the novel an uneasy edge (not necessarily a bad thing), for me, in terms of the constant debate on immigration. It’s something you pick up on in the novel (Nadia questioning herself “What has happened to me? I used to be a feminist. Now I seem to be turning into Mrs Daily Mail”). Did Lewycka worry about being politically correct when writing Valentina, or is the world of fiction exempt from such worries? "I did worry about this a lot, - she admits, - but I wanted to be truthful. And the truth is that immigrants are like any other people – some are awful, and some are heroes, and most are somewhere in between. Valentina is awful to her husband, but she does it for the sake of her child. She breaks every law going, but no one could accuse her of being lazy or a scrounger – on the contrary, she is exploited herself. The episode where Dubov talks about the introduction of ‘gangster capitalism’ into Ukraine and the ‘export of beautiful women’ is the chapter where I try to frame this discussion in a wider context – but I don’t want to hammer home a point. At the end of the day, the story speaks for itself, and there are Valentinas in every culture. I didn’t mean her to be unredeemed – she is redeemed by her beautiful and innocent baby, and by the love and forgiveness of her husband. But that happens off-stage, maybe in the back of the Rolls Royce in some faraway lay-by between Krakow and Przemysl."

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