The only experience that I had with a tractor was when I was an exchange student and my host dad made me drive one. That was literally half a lifetime ago before my 17th birthday and it was an old orange tractor, and only had two gears. It drove really, really slow on the country roads but it was still legit transportation, even though you still get dirty looks from people who go past you on the roads. Recently, my host brother sent me a photo of the farm where I drove the orange beast and what d’you know, the tractor still runs and looked younger than it was almost twenty years ago.
Tractors can be personal to the farmer, and they tend to take care of them that it last for most of their lives until the next new technology comes along. Tractors are the engines which run the most important industry for any country: agriculture. And in some ways, the book touch upon the importance of tractors in society, with other anecdotes thrown in between. But to my disappointment, the novel actually has very little else on tractors. Most of the novel deals with a petty family drama of children of Ukrainian immigrants.
The children are middle-aged, one in her forties and the other in her fifties. Due to inheritance issues, the sister hate each other and have not spoken to each other for years, that is until they found a common enemy in the new romance of their seventy-year old staunchly Ukrainian father. He is head over heels with this woman who are no older than his daughters and with obvious motives: immigration to the U.K. and being a gold digger herself, money to inherit and more immediately, money to spend.
And here is where the trouble lie with the book because none of the characters are really all that great. In fact, you can go as far to say that they’re all idiots and none are likeable. The main character, Nadezhda has a weak disposition, often bullied by her older sister, Vera. In some ways, all the characters in the novel are one dimensional and has only two or three distinguishing traits. If there are any arcs that the characters go through in the end, this seems contrived and forced. But perhaps this is due to the tone of the book, which tries hard to be comedic in tone but always falling flat.
This is especially true in the case of Valentina, the father’s new wife. She is sultry, slutty and an unashamed opportunist. Her character was built up from hearsay and we don’t meet the woman until a hundred pages in. She is easily one of the most unlikeable characters of recent memory, but there is no depth to her. Valentina sleeps around and emasculates her father. Her dream is to send her son to college where he could acquire the sophistication of the English with an Oxford education. And the son is almost as unlikeable as Valentina is.
But in some ways, Valentina is representative of the immigrant dream. Unable to eke out a living in her native Ukraine, she fights tooth and nail in order to make a semblance of a life in England, and pursues the dreams that she has, with toxic expectations: multiple cars, expensive clothes, breast implants. Her game is a game that younger women have played on older men for years. I think if the character was better written, we may be able to feel more empathy for Valentina.
There is also the push and pull of the cultures here of British writers who have roots from other countries. Where the conflict lies is where the story lies, but I have seldom read immigrant writing that has balanced the present (the adopted country) and the past (the origin country). In Lewycka’s case, the present is a heavier presence than the past. Lewycka herself was born in a refugee camp, and there are bits of this history in the book. She sees herself as English through and through now, and this is also apparent in the book.
Readers who’d want to learn more about Ukrainian culture will be disappointed. Readers who’d want to find out more about tractors will be less disappointed because there are a few tractor anecdotes here, but not as much as you’d expect. The book would probably be better off with more tractors, instead of the family feud that feels a bit samey after a while.
