We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka
The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton
Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies
We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more accurately, her third published novel, since she famously made her way through several other works and a rain-forest’s worth of rejection-slips before finding success with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) at the age of 59. It is a multi-stranded book narrated by Georgie Sinclair, a Yorkshire-born woman in her forties who now lives in London. Georgie’s husband recently walked out, leaving her alone with, among other things, a mounting level of sexual frustration and a tragic job writing for a trade magazine, Adhesives in the Modern World (this is one of many self-mocking references: Lewycka was also once a non-fiction hack).
Shortly after throwing her husband’s possessions into a skip, she meets Mrs Shapiro, an elderly Jewish émigrée. Mrs Shapiro, who is a compulsive scrimper, retrieves the items and invites Georgie to her tumbledown, cat-strewn house for a thrifty meal of out-of-date fish. The women become friends, and Georgie’s shiftless life begins to liven up when she has to fend off a weird lady from Social Services who is desperate to put Mrs Shapiro into residential care and a pair of unscrupulous estate agents who are trying to harass Mrs Shapiro into selling her house. All the while, a story of wartime abuse and lost love emerges, as Georgie finds out about the old woman’s past.
This is a flawed yet charming novel. Some episodes are just silly, and Georgie is implausibly blind to her own teenage son’s burgeoning loopiness. The satire is not subtle; the dodgy estate agents are called Mr Wolfe and Mr Diabolo. However, that broadness can arguably be seen as a natural side-effect of the book’s main strength: We are All Made of Glue is a big, bustling novel, told with enthusiasm by a narrator who is warm, winningly disaster-prone and, crucially, believable.
The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton, introduces a strong new talent. It seems relevant to point out that the author was 20 when she started to write it (she is just 23 now): with that in mind, the prose and the voice can be fairly described as exciting — notwithstanding some adjectival overuse, Catton has a feel for words and an instinctively elegant style of phrasing, and her level of insight into people’s unspoken motivations is amusing and impressive to read.
Her debut novel examines the aftermath of a sex scandal at a girls’ school. Mr Saladin, the jazz teacher (this is no ordinary school), has been caught having an affair with Victoria, one of the pupils. Across town, at the drama school, the students are being trained to act out other people’s lives: the culmination of this is that they decide to perform the by now notorious scandal as a play.
The Rehearsal looks at the relationship between truth and make-believe, using a time-frame which skitters backwards and forwards. It is far from being fully realised: the frenetic structure cannot hide the essential lack of plot, and the dialogue is uneven; some characters speak in drab platitudes, while the saxophone teacher (an ageing lesbian who lusts after the girls) for some reason speaks in a meta-fictional parody of romantic prose (‘Do you hear me, with your mouth like a thin scarlet thread and your deflated bosom and your stale mustard blouse?’), which draws the reader’s sympathy out of any interaction in which she is involved, since it is all so clearly artificial. However, it is a first novel which promises much, and, despite its imperfections, it is a frequently admirable book.
Although an omniscient narrator tells us a story, he also withholds one, since often what ought to be the first thing one is told is kept back for hundreds of pages. In his new novel, Yalo, Elias Khoury emphasises the author’s withholding role to the greatest degree, since he never quite makes clear to us what truly happened and what was merely alleged.
The title character is being questioned in Lebanon by an unknown interrogator. Yalo appears to have been a thief who, while employed as a forest warden, ambushed trysting lovers, robbing them and raping the women. He claims that one woman, Shireen, fell in love with him and that they had an affair. However, she is the reason he is being interrogated, since it is her claim of rape that led to Yalo’s arrest. By giving different people’s accounts of the same events, Khoury allows us only to speculate about the truth: is Yalo really a rapist and, if so, was Shireen really one of his victims? Without providing an answer to that, Khoury hints at Yalo’s tormented upbringing, which suggests expiation for later crimes; the truth, though, ultimately remains oblique.
The book is repetitive but intriguing; it is not beautifully written (in this translation, at least) but it is an enjoyable novel about innocence and guilt, and a fascinating portrayal of either a poor man’s desperate justifications or a madman’s delusional self-pity and lies.
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