The best of both worlds

Marina Lewycka is not one to shy away from telling things as she sees them. Photo . Doug Sherring

It's widely assumed that a novel has to fall into one of two camps: the mind-expanding or the purely entertaining. But British writer Marina Lewycka proves that it is entirely possible to be both at once.

In her latest novel, the author of the best-selling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian tackles some big issues - such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the cavalier treatment of the elderly - while managing to be very funny at the same time.

We Are All Made of Glue (Fig Tree, $37) begins as the story of Georgie Sinclair. Her husband has walked out and her son is having a teenage crisis.

Then lonely Georgie meets a charismatic, slightly shabby old Jewish woman called Naomi Shapiro and is drawn into other lives, times and places.

Georgie finds her marital problems end up on the backburner as she tries to defend Mrs Shapiro from unscrupulous property developers, rescue her from a nursing home and care for her horde of smelly cats. For Lewycka, who divides her time between homes in Sheffield and Wanganui (she's married to a New Zealander), the story began when she saw a skip on her street in England being filled with an elderly woman's belongings.

"She was a little Jewish lady who had died and a property developer had bought her house and hired a clearance company who junked all her stuff," explains Lewycka, 62.

"I went through the skip and found her letters and photos, a collection of very glamorous hats going back to the 1940s and some beautiful shoes that were just a little too small for me. It was all terribly sad. But I learned far more about this old lady that I'd seen trundling up and down our street after her death than I'd ever known when she was alive."

Lewycka has forged a successful career writing about characters such as Naomi Shapiro, immigrants with big personalities and sadness just the lightest scratch beneath the surface.

But publication came relatively late for this former university lecturer and teacher. She was 57 when her first book was accepted and by then she'd amassed a large collection of rejection slips. "I was sent 36 of them for my second attempt at a novel and I've kept them all."

She laughs at the idea those publishers must be kicking themselves now. "I jolly well hope they are."

Part of Lewycka's problem was that she saw herself as a serious person who wrote serious books. "Then I realised I could write funny books about serious things."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was an award winner translated into 29 languages and it drew heavily on Lewycka's family background.

She was born in a German refugee camp in 1946, then raised in Britain. Her Ukrainian parents had been taken from their home by the Nazis and forced to work as labourers. They rarely talked about the past. It wasn't until Lewycka's first novel was published that she found her mother's Ukrainian family. "I met her sister and gave her a copy of a tape I'd made of my mother talking about her life two or three years before she'd died. It was very, very sad."

That immigrant background is one of the things Lewycka credits with equipping her with the skills to be a novelist.

"Having an outsider's perspective makes you observant," she says. "You look into people's worlds and really study them because you want them to like you and accept you. All outsiders - whether it's because of religion, ethnicity or even because they're gay - do have that extra observant eye."

And Lewycka enjoys writing immigrant voices. "It's a way of being light-hearted about my past and my family." But she's aware that this latest novel has huge potential to offend.

In it she brings both Jews and Palestinians together in a big, crumbling London house and proceeds to send up both factions quite mercilessly.

Getting the balance of comic and serious, dark and light is always tricky for Lewycka, but particularly so in this novel, which has dollops of historical fact folded through the story.

"I had to be careful to put the comic voice aside when I was writing about the serious things as that would have been offensive," Lewycka says.

"There's a scene I put in deliberately where Georgie is on a bus driving down an avenue of trees and the light and dark fall on her face.

"For me that's what the book is like, going down that avenue of trees."

Lewycka was no expert on the Jewish/Palestinian conflict and relished the process of educating herself. "I researched on the internet and went to Israel and Palestine and talked to a lot of people," she says. "I like writing about things I don't know much about so I can learn about them and take the reader along on the journey with me. It's sort of like a quest."