Holding it together
Holiday reading: Marina Lewycka's latest novel, We are all made of glue, is reviewed by Annette White
We are all made of glue by Marina Lewycka. Fig Tree (Penguin Group). ISBN 978 1 905 49022 6. Hardback: £18.99 Georgie Sinclair, the heroine of this delightful novel, edits the trade magazine Adhesives in the Modern World. About as exciting as a history of tractors in Ukrainian, you might think, and yet the fascinating facts about adhesives that emerge throughout the book, from the organic glues made of bones to modern polymers that share particles with each other, provide a rich extended metaphor about human bonding.
Georgie’s husband has recently left her, and her teenage son Ben spends too much time in his room, combing the internet for fundamentalist Armageddon sites. Then she meets Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric German Jewish refugee who lives in a big mansion nearby with a herd of cats, led by the ferocious bruiser Wonder Boy. The house was once splendid but suffers from total neglect and squalor, incontinent cats and an invasive monkey puzzle tree.
Mrs Shapiro is wily and manipulative but also charming and vulnerable. She invites Georgie to a death-defying fish supper (more salmonella than salmon). Soon afterwards Georgie is surprised to hear that Mrs Shapiro is in hospital and has named her as next of kin. She is given a key to the house and looks for documents to satisfy the hospital bureaucracy. And so begins a search into Mrs Shapiro’s past, which is unravelled gradually. At the same time Georgie must guard against scheming estate agents (one firm rejoices in the name of Wolfe and Diabello) in league with social service and council officials who want to get their mitts on the property. At one point this involves Mrs Shapiro being virtually imprisoned in ‘Nightmare House’, a maximum security nursing home, while uncaring officials try to get her to sign over power of attorney.
Meanwhile the house needs minor repairs, so along comes Mr Ali, a Palestinian handyman, and his two juniors, the ‘Uselesses’. Through the story of the Palestinian, the late Mr Shapiro’s connections in Israel and Ben’s fixation with the Holy Land, the book obliquely focuses on the Middle East and its difficult history. As always, Marina Lewycka treats all sides with an even-handed and non-judgmental attitude. Readers of the Friend might ask what marks this book out as the work of a Quaker: apart from a quick mention of the Friends’ School in Ramallah, it is her sympathetic treatment of all things human (and feline) and her social concern and non-cynical optimism that meet that criterion. Even the one really vicious social services official has a kind and fluffy counterpart.
Marina’s books have delightful subplots and side-strands, for example the voice of the Dog in Two Caravans. This book is no exception: there is a romantic novel-in-progress (The Splattered Heart) through which Georgie tries to come to terms with her marital failure. There are the amusing idiosyncrasies of the English language as used by foreigners. There is romance, reconciliation and matchmaking, some of which succeeds, and above all there is the heartwarming development of a makeshift community that defies the machinations of officialdom and capitalists, at least up to a point. This is a warm and funny book that would make a great gift.
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