Interview: Marina Lewycka

Jonathan Doering talks to writer Marina Lewycka about her work, Europe and Quakerism

Marina Lewycka revealed her talent for comic writing in 2005 when her debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Two years later she was shortlisted for this award again, along with the Orwell Prize for political writing, for her thought-provoking Two Caravans. She followed these books with We are All Made of Glue and Various Pets Alive and Dead, each carving out humour from life in modern Britain.

She has now produced the Bollinger-shortlisted The Lubetkin Legacy, which follows the travails of Bertie, a recently bereaved actor and ingénu, trying to pass off an old lady from his mother’s hospital ward as his mother in order to retain right of residence in an elegant Berthold Lubetkin-designed housing block. The local council may no longer appreciate Lubetkin’s passion for creating beautiful spaces for ordinary people to live in, but they certainly recognise valuable building space when they see it. So the stage is set for another satirical farce, where social limits are gently but firmly teased and strained. This book seems all the timelier in the light of the award of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal to Neave Brown, the previously shunned architect of layered social housing in London, not unlike Lubetkin’s social project.

I met Marina Lewycka in South Sheffield, near Sheffield Hallam University, where she was for many years a lecturer in media studies, to discuss her life, writing and relationship with Quakerism.

How would you say your earlier careers in journalism and lecturing have fed into your writing?

PR [public relations] and journalism are all about making stories. The wonderful thing about journalism is that it gets you into the discipline of writing quickly and focusing on the story. But I was much more disciplined when I started. I’ve been slacking a bit recently.

Is there a particular reason for that?

I think it’s probably just my age!

Do you enjoy writing as much as you did?

I do, but I’ve got so many things connected with being a writer. I don’t actually do a lot of writing. The days when I had the whole day ahead of me with nothing to do apart from write are few and far between now

Do you find that frustrating sometimes?

Yes. I’ve just come back from six months in Singapore. It was nice, but it was time consuming and I really didn’t get much done. I was writer-in-residence at a university there. The students were nice, but I got a bit lonely. I didn’t make friends very easily, as I was living in an empty building. It was interesting, though. I’m glad I did it. Six months is a long time, but on the other hand it gave me the experience of living abroad in a different culture, which I hadn’t done before.

Might that link with you being the child of immigrant parents in a culture that wasn’t their birth culture?

It might. They were younger, in their early thirties, when they came here, and they adapted, in their different ways. People were very nice to us; they’ve become a lot less nice to the other people who have come since. The reasons are complex. It’s partly to do with the hostility and abuse aimed at immigrants in the popular press. It’s partly that people felt there were fewer of us and we weren’t so visibly different.

Do you have a writing process?

I’ve just bought a new laptop, so I don’t know what my process is going to be! I tend to squeeze it in around everything else I’m doing. I go for walks and plan, but it’s not until I’ve actually got my hands on the keyboard that the words come. A lot of it is trial and error. It’s not until I’ve written something that I know whether it works or not. I do quite a lot of research, but the planning almost always goes out the window once I start actually writing, because the stories always turn out to be more complicated than I could have anticipated. I think that’s one of my problems as a writer as well as one of my strengths: my stories are always complex.

You’ve previously talked about losing yourself when you’re writing.

I think that’s the greatest pleasure, actually being in a different place and time, seeing the world through different eyes. It’s really wonderful.

Is that one reason why you’ve continued to be a writer?

I think so. I would miss it if it didn’t happen.

Would you say that there’s a spiritual dimension to that, losing yourself in someone else’s story?

It’s an opportunity to see the world from another perspective, and that fits with Quakerism because when you feel you are that other person, you are never wholly bad or wholly good. One of the things I really like about Quakerism is the belief that there’s that of God in everybody, and I try to find that in unsympathetic characters. I don’t know if I always succeed, and I don’t think it’s very fashionable, because I’m not able to write a really good villain. I’m too understanding and forgiving.

You can’t demonise your villains?

I have to see their full humanity.

Do you still attend Quaker Meeting?

My husband was the Quaker, and I sometimes went with him to Sheffield Meeting. Sadly, he passed away and I don’t go to Meeting any more.

Is there anything that you miss or not about Meeting?

One thing they say about writers is that you have to have a splinter of ice in your heart, and I think that splinter of ice is incompatible with Quakerism, because Quakerism encourages us to see the good in people, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t encourage us to see the bad. It doesn’t help us to see the bad in the world.

I think that’s interesting. As a Quaker, I’d want to ask you how that fits in with social witness and all of the activism that some Quakers are involved in.

That’s one thing I feel that I do have in common with Quakers. I like the way that they engage with the world, but all the faiths are doing it now. Most of the opposition that we had to austerity was from not just the Quakers but also [from other] churches and other faith groups. They were the only ones with the guts to stand up against what this government was doing. One thing that I very much like about Quakerism is the duty to speak truth to power and that’s what I try to do in my books, but I try to do it in a gentle, funny way rather than carping all the time!

Quaker faith & practice contains references to creativity and beauty, like the quote about the ‘daily round of beauty’ and ‘goodness’ in creativity (21.36)? Are you trying to achieve something similar?

I try to write in such a way as to imagine myself in relation to the beauty that comes through the senses. Sometimes it’s man-made, sometimes it’s natural. It’s the ability to lose yourself in that beauty that is the wellspring of creativity. I think that’s what every writer tries to do, to capture the world’s sensual beauty. And sometimes, of course, its sensual ugliness.

Losing yourself in the world’s sensual ugliness and beauty makes me think of how you’ve talked of trying to ‘capture the Zeitgeist’ in your writing. What would you say is the Zeitgeist right now?

Right now it’s ugly and dangerous, but very interesting. I’m writing a book that’s partly about Brexit and its impact on one family and partly about financial fraud. I think that there’s a great preoccupation with crime and the darker sides of human nature in popular fiction. I’m not particularly interested in crime as such, more in how ordinary people make bad decisions. That’s what makes characters interesting. No one’s wholly good or bad: people have complex reasons for becoming who they are.

You’ve talked previously about when you were younger wanting to be a ‘Writer with a capital W’. Is comic writing a kind of ‘capital W’ writing?

I wish that I could write like William Thackeray. I admire a lot of comic writers who I think are a lot better than me. I like Jonathan Coe very much, and Jon Canter, with whom I’ve just done a workshop. The British sense of humour has rubbed off on me, alongside the dark humour inherited from my parents and Eastern Europe.

How do you find humour in a situation?

First, I think, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Then I see how far I can push it, how absurd it can become. I like to poke fun at pretension.

You’ve said that you have a great belief in human nature, how ‘the goodness comes out when you talk to people…

Also the badness. I have a naïve belief in human goodness, because, of course, human nature is also responsible for Auschwitz. I do need to learn how to see people a bit more darkly.

Do you think that you write your books as a way of encouraging people to continue that dialogue?

I hope so, yes.

If more people talked to each other, it wouldn’t be about pretending that there wasn’t darkness in people. There’s darkness in everybody, but maybe it would be more bearable because we could see in shades of grey as well as black and white…

That’s true, but we tend to speak with people like ourselves, and don’t tend to engage with the slightly scary forces out there. I don’t know anyone who voted for Brexit, for example. I feel British but also European. That’s extended my scope of what being British can mean.

Some of see themselves as citizens of an island off the coast of Europe and like to visit Europe but aren’t drawn to being European culturally, and are keen to ‘take back control’…

That’s what I’m trying to capture in the novel I’m working on at present, which is how very divisive this issue is, and how it’s core to people’s identity. The working title is Control, but I haven’t completely worked it out yet. The more I go into it, the more complicated I realise it is.

What about your new book The Lubetkin Legacy?

In a way I feel that it’s a book that has come out too early, because if I’d known, I’d have put some of these arguments about Brexit into it. Everything’s changed, but a lot of the issues which drove people to vote for Brexit are highlighted in Legacy, of people feeling dispossessed in their own country.

I suppose there are people who are genuinely dispossessed, and others who feel dispossessed, who objectively may not be…

Yes, but Bertie is dispossessed in the sense that he fears losing his flat, he has this awful interview, he does humiliating work, but then he finds love. Maybe love is the only thing that rescues us from dispossession in the end. Then there’s the other character, Violet, who’s much more a comment on what’s wrong with the world globally. If you go to London, it’s a building site. New flats are going up all the time, yet if you look behind all of those hoardings, you see the traces of an older London, where people had different values. One of the things that make me very angry is this belief that public housing is a kind of charitable gift. People like the architect Lubetkin, who built public housing, saw it as people’s right.

One of the most pernicious things about the sale of social housing was that local authorities weren’t allowed to use the receipts to build more social housing. That money went straight back to central government, so they couldn’t replenish the housing stock. It was asset stripping. For many, the welfare state and public assets have been their wealth. They haven’t had wealth tucked away in bank accounts, but they’ve had the public sector, hospitals, schools, safe streets, housing. That’s been where their wealth has rested. But that’s gradually been stripped away. It’s seen as belonging to the government, but it doesn’t. It belongs to the people, and the government had no right to sell it off, I think.

Marina Lewycka’s novel The Lubetkin Legacy is published by Penguin.

Jonathan is a member of Barnsley Meeting. This is the third in a series in which he talks to Quakers working in the arts.

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