The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid: A couple’s hilarious Brexit fallout

Marina Lewycka has a lot to answer for. Her breakthrough debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), may well be responsible for the miserable glut of quirky novel titles we now see.

You know the sort of thing: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008); The Earth Hums in B Flat (2009); The Incontinence of the King’s Elephants (any day now, probably). But just like Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding before her, she can’t be blamed for the stragglers that follow in her wake: her novels are bright and funny, if often strained.

Now she has Brexit Britain in her sights in her new novel The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid. Given that Brexit has been, in the UK at least, consistent headline news since the publication of Lewycka’s last novel in 2016, it seems like exquisitely bad timing that it has ceased to be a dominant issue – for now – just weeks before publication of this book. Then again, Brexit was not so much a root cause as a symptom of other things – intolerance, class divisions, country v city - and those factors look to be pretty evergreen.

To summarise the breakneck plot of this novel would require the entirety of this week’s books pages [No chance – Ed], but a light overview goes something like this. Sheffield couple George Pantis, who’s approaching 80, and his wife Rosie, who’s 20 years younger, have been driven apart by Britain’s EU referendum vote: she voted to remain, he to leave. George has driven himself into the arms of their neighbour, hairdresser “Brexit Brenda” whose own hair is the colour of “a shop-bought sponge cake”, and simultaneously George is told that he has won £7 million on a Kosovan state lottery that he can’t remember entering.

Gunshots

These two elements – the EU vote and the lottery win – are gunshots that create crazed lines of subplots and secondary characters, including multiple crossing and double-crossing bank employees, a brothel keeper laundering her profits as a dog groomer, and a chase across Europe involving a Kosovan crime gang.

So we are in flagrant farce territory, though Lewycka seeks to bring some ballast to the party with Rosie and George’s son Sid, who is so sensible that Rosie thinks “she must have overdone his toilet training”, and whose partner Jacquie is pregnant (with the “Referendum Baby”). Unfortunately she also gives them a daughter Cassie who seems to be an afterthought creation, existing in the story only for Sid to have someone to discuss his parents with, and whose sole characteristic is to talk with an annoying upward inflection (if you know what I mean? Represented on the page like this?).

But for at least half the book’s length, it’s very funny and playful, and it works. There are some great set pieces, such as a violent row between Rosie and Brenda in the latter’s hairdressing salon, and surprises too, where even a racist attack on a Muslim woman ends up being played for laughs as she retaliates with a tirade of Yorkshire’s finest swearing. (“George is impressed at her manifest assimilation, her ability to straddle two cultures.”)

Lewycka knows what she’s playing at: she often subverts the reader’s expectations, as when Brenda gives Rosie a peace offering of some hair balm which makes Rosie’s hair fall out, but only because Rosie applied her own depilatory cream instead; or a family birthday dinner which should turn into a chaotic argument but passes off peacefully.

Aphrodisiac qualities

She’s good too at touching on the social issues without being heavy-handed. Brenda represents the change that leave voters wanted from Brexit, while Rosie notes that “democracy has triumphed – so why does it not feel like a triumph, but a festering swamp of hatred?”

And there are plenty of novelties in the book, from the, um, aphrodisiac qualities of Brexit’s “emancipatory promise” for George, to this book being perhaps the first novel ever where the author thanks the online readers of the Daily Mail, “whose comments, often forcefully expressed, helped me to get to know their point of view”.

But there’s no doubt that it all falls apart in the second half, when the Kosovans enter the scene and Lewycka stops trying to make her characters real and sympathetic, but then as she says in the introduction: “There are no good guys in this book, unless you count George and Rosie Pantis who, like most people, are both good and bad and a little bit stupid.”

She also said, in an interview promoting an earlier book, that her late start in writing fiction (she was 58 when her debut was published, and is now 73) stopped her from wanting to be “a proper writer with a capital W. [...]I think the best thing you can do as a writer is cheer people up a little bit for an hour or two.” Job done, then.