Book review: Various Pets Dead and Alive

Serge, mathematical whiz and misfit second child of ageing lefties Doro and Marcus, sits with one eye on his screen, watching for share fluctuations, the other on an impossibly leggy Ukrainian emigrée called Maroushka who, contrary to the rules of the trading floor, is talking on her mobile phone.

Maroushka, for anyone with eyes to see, is either having an affair with the boss, setting up an illicit transaction, or stupid; except that she’s more of a numbers genius than Serge is. Lolling in her swivel chair, feet on desk, she acts the temptress: “No shoes. No tights. Her toenails bling-bling like rubies. She’s talking in that outlandish bubbly language of hers…” Here is a side of the evil banking industry I hadn’t thought of: people making indecent crate-loads of cash while manipulating little more than an emery board and a miniature bottle of varnish. Maroushka is the spiritual twin of Valentina, the impossibly leggy Ukrainian who bewitched an 84-year-old in Lewycka’s best-selling debut, and she has clearly turned Serge’s head. Banish notions of vitamin D-deficient drones toiling away in the sunless palaces of Mammon: in this little square of the City a lot of flirting, and other non-curricular activity, is going on.

There are plenty of madcap moments in Various Pets Alive and Dead, although not as many as fans of Lewycka’s earlier novels might like. The tamest is the scene in which Serge’s mother and young Down’s syndrome sister arrange to meet him in Cambridge, where they think he’s still working on his PhD. Steering them away from the rooms in Queens’ that he no longer occupies, he manages to tip half of Cambridge into the Cam in a spectacular punting incident propelled by his shocked, if mistaken, belief that Maroushka is also out on the river. More entertaining – a riff of nightmarish brilliance, in fact – is the episode where a panicked Serge blacks out in the street and wakes in what he takes to be the flat of a sex professional providing S&M sessions to City traders. It’s all a misunderstanding: what he hears as “Seeing Eye” and takes to be a reference to kinky sex is in fact “CI” – the lady in pink leggings specialises in colonic irrigation. (A shame the punchline has such a weak linguistic confusion to hinge on.)

Serge has taken his £90,000-a-year City job, finding ways to “take the riskiness out of risk”, because – unlike his parents – he likes the idea of becoming fabulously wealthy. His other sister, Clara, a primary school teacher, fears he’s shallow. Still, he has spent a whole year in the job apparently sticking to the rules; it’s only when he finds he’s picked up the £13,000 tab for Maroushka’s birthday bash that his thoughts turn to placing private bets on the stock market. From the moment he conducts his first secret trade in the disabled loo you know it’s only a matter of time before his private world, like the financial world outside, begins to unravel.

The shame is that Various Pets Alive and Dead doesn’t confine itself to Serge’s misadventures in Crashland – a bitingly wacky critique on the banking crisis. But Lewycka gives us two more sober family narratives in parallel, one from Clara, one from Doro, ostensibly filling out Serge’s backstory while telling their own. Their tones – despite some entertaining set pieces – are in marked contrast to Serge’s City misadventures. Dora looks back on and reconsiders the Doncaster commune she and Marcus joined in the late 1960s. Clara recalls what it was like to grow up there, sharing not just siblings and parents but clothes too (very traumatic). She suspects something about Serge was always unnatural, telling how in a sibling tiff at the age of four he squeezed a hamster, on loan for the weekend, so tightly that it died. This incident, and another hamster tragedy – plus a dark scene involving multiplying rabbits – appears to have scarred them both. I found myself wanting to shout: You were children! Grow up, get over it!

Other pets find their way into the narrative, most but not all coming to a dodgy end. I began to lose patience with this; but it was nothing to the succession of mishearings and misunderstandings of the “Seeing Eye” variety that pepper the narrative. These became decidedly irritating.

In an epilogue, various loose ends are tied up by Marcus, who hasn’t had much to say before. He makes sense of one of the narrative threads, reflects on a secret revealed, and takes the novel into altogether darker territory while also imparting comforting news. This mix of darkness and light may be trademark Lewycka, but it seems forced here. The canvas is too big: as a novel for our times I suspect Various Pets Alive and Dead is a lot less important than it thinks it is.

• VARIOUS PETS ALIVE AND DEAD

BY MARINA LEWYCKA

Fig Tree, 265pp, £12.99