"We are all God's creatures"
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Weaving a Pandora's box of themes and ideas into her novel, Marina Lewycka's Strawberry Fields begins in a field in rural England where a group of immigrant seasonal agricultural workers spend their days picking ripening strawberries on a ramshackle farm. Run by the officious Farmer Leapish, the farm has workers that have come from all corners of the world, including Poland Ukraine, Africa and China.
Supervised by the bossy Yola, whose main aim is to ensure that this community lives in sexual harmony, the farm is a hardscrabble world where the women always earn less than the men and where Leapish is more concerned with working with the grain of human nature to maximize both productivity and yield, than to look after the well-being of his employees.
Apart from the officious Yola the collection of workers is varied and eclectic. There's Yola's big nosed niece Marta, and two Chinese girls, and also Irina who has just arrived from Kiev, tired and disheveled, "with a faint whiff of chip fat about her." Meanwhile, the poor forty-something Thomasz, with hair to his shoulders and stringy beard, feels as though his life is just slipping away, even as Emanuel an African catholic lyrically sings his religious songs.
Orbiting all of them is Andriy, a miner's son from Donbas still haunted by the mine disaster in which he survived but where his beloved father died. What at first seems like a mild infatuation with the pure and rather snobbish Irina soon develops into a full blown romance as all of the workers are forced to flee after an accident leaves Leapish injured and Yola worrying about the police.
What develops is a type of road story, part of a clever plot that twists and turns as this group of characters travel all over the United Kingdom working in nursing homes and restaurant kitchens and getting themselves involved in all sorts of misadventures, especially when they reconnect with fellow strawberry picker Vitaly who has dissolved into a new smoothly confident businessman who now slips effortlessly between Polish and English.
A shady "recruitment consultant," Vitaly offers up "dynamic employment solutions," convincing his colleagues that working in such places as a chicken processing plant will finally give them all the opportunity to earn plenty of "good English money." Things, however, fall apart, and the delicate balance of the group is upset when Irina is separated from Andriy and she goes on the run and outside of everything in a world where nobody wants her.
Meanwhile, the poor Andriy accompanied by his pet dog, is constantly consumed by the memories his dead dad and the fact that all his dreams and ideals are dead with him, the solidarity, humanity, and the self-respect in this new world that is now run by entrepreneurial "mobilfonmen."
When they finally goes their separate ways, we get to see their true resourcefulness as they eat what they can and sleep where they lay, and what ensues is a complicated brew of exploitation as the new arrivals, the confused, the desperate, and the greedy are taken advantage by all of these self-made middle men who tap into other people's labor, and get rich on harvesting the efforts these innocent fragments of globalized labor.
The novel is intricately structured as Lewycka weaves in her characters' Ukrainian past with their lives on the run. She also constantly introduces new characters like the disgusting farm owner Boris, who tries to seduce Irina in exchange for work, covering her with slimy kisses, and Neil, who works at the chicken processing plant, laughing and joking in front of Thomasz as he slaughters the animals that submit meekly to the daily horror while packed in a small stinking room.
Others are like Vulk, who wears a horrible black fake-leather jacket like a comic-strip gangster, and who makes a living exploiting his own kind. As many of these characters spin off into the ether, some meet a nasty end and others help these workers along in their search across the country as they wait for their luck to change or for their time to run out.
The journey of these workers is certainly defined with momentary triumphs and false steps and the book emerges as a type of guide for new immigrants who are intent to do battle in this newly formed global economy where the West seems intent on abuse and exploitation. Obviously, there are no easy answers to the questions posed in this novel, but the issues give Lewycka a chance to explore, in the sardonic exchanges between the characters, many of the issues that interest her.
If Strawberry Fields sometimes lacks the tightly plotted precision of Lewycka's previous novel, it certainly makes up for it with its ambitious structure. The novel is indeed a complex study of the globalized world and the current labor market in developed counties, and its examination of the many migrant workers and asylum seekers who come from every strife-torn corner makes for a compelling, and at times, absolutely heart-rendering case. Mike Leonard August 07.
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