Growing up in the shadow of a homeland far away

Abandoned by her Hungarian husband, Laura moves in with his elderly female relatives in Bayswater for the sake of her teenage daughter. This is a coming-of-age story that fuses an English boarding school farce with a Chekhovian tragicomedy — but always has something of a fairytale running through it, says Johanna Thomas-Corr
Charlotte Mendelson
Rebecca Reid
Johanna Thomas-Corr1 August 2013

Almost English
by Charlotte Mendelson
(Mantle, £16.99)

Charlotte Mendelson’s fourth novel, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, opens with an epigraph from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “We are in Transylvania and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways and there shall be to you many strange things.” It sets the tone for a coming-of-age story that fuses an English boarding school farce with a Chekhovian tragicomedy — but always has something of a fairytale running through it.

The story begins in the late 1980s. Long since abandoned by her Hungarian husband Peter, the hyper-sensitive Laura is forced to move in with his elderly female relatives for the sake of her teenage daughter Marina. In a cramped Bayswater flat that smells of cabbage with caraway, both mother and dowdy daughter feel imprisoned among the strange customs of Rozsi Farkas and her two sisters, witch-like fairy godmothers who still pine for their semi-mythical homeland.

They speak “a distorted English, full of dactyls which dust familiar words — ‘Pee-codilly’ or ‘vosh-ingmochine’ or indeed ‘Vest-minstaircourt’ — with snow and fir and darkness.” Though their native language is Hungarian and their hometown is now in the Ukraine, the sisters consider themselves Czech but burst into tears whenever Marina asks about their complicated histories. One of them is generally chopping dill.

Against this eccentric backdrop, Mendelson charts the comical crises of mother and daughter as they attempt to define their own identities. Laura has an angsty affair with her married employer, who refers to his penis as his “membrum virile”, before her contrite husband, Peter, reappears after a 13-year yoga retreat in Wales.

Meanwhile, Marina sets off for boarding school in Dorset, convinced the experience will make her more “English”. Here, she accidentally acquires a prat of a boyfriend who in turn introduces her to his father Alexander, a pompous TV historian. Marina is soon convinced that it is Alexander who should teach her how to be English (“Don’t interrupt. Rather, the question is: what are you? That’s the aspect which interests me”). However, as a series of fantastical plot twists try to prove, Englishness is a slippery concept. And narcissistic middle-aged men are slipperier still. (The Dracula quote proves apt. All of the men in the book are vampiric, sucking the blood from the women.)

Mendelson, who has mined her own Hungarian heritage, is clearly animated by the transition from family life to adult independence. Marina is itchy to escape her coven of relations — and yet desperately sentimental about them. When they arrive at her public school, “in their furry coats like bears who have strayed into a picnic”, she feels exposed by their otherness.

Still, it is frustrating that we don’t learn more about this otherness. The preposterous Alexander characterises the Farkas’ homeland as a place of “forests, castles, goose-girls, wolves. Princes. Mountain lions” but Mendelson’s reluctance to probe this fairytale heritage feels evasive.

By juxtaposing the panicky thoughts of Marina with the panicky thoughts of her mother, the author ensures that the overriding tone of the book is nervous hysteria. I longed to make the imaginative leap into the mind of one of the Hungarian matriarchs — great-aunt Zsuzsi, whose admirers send expensive Dutch chocolates, or grandmother Rozsi, who confronted communist rebels, forged passports and once lamped a policeman.

Mendelson may have a talent for evoking teenage neurosis but you can’t help but wish for a richer, more tantalising story of family strife.

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