Strawberry Fields: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)it doesn't matter much to me
Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to Strawberry Fields
I approached Marina Lewycka's "Strawberry Fields" with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Lewycka's first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, was a first-rate farce, a brilliant book. Second novels are challenging, both for the author and for the reader. The author is challenged to live up to the promise of her first work. The reader is challenged by virtue of his own heightened expectation and anticipation that the second work will match the qualities of the first novel. Happily, Lewycka was up to the task and "Strawberry Fields" was a funny, satisfying book to read.
The title refers to the strawberry fields found in Kent, England which during the summer are populated by migrant agricultural workers from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. The story opens with the arrival of a new worker, Irina, in a strawberry field in Kent, England. Irina is a young girl straight off the bus from Kiev. She is teamed up with a motley group of workers from Poland (Yola, Tomasz, and Marta), Ukraine (Andriy), Malawi (Emanuel), and China (known to the crew only as Chinese Girls One and Two). The field has two trailers for the crew to sleep in - one for the women and one for the men. (The book's title in the UK is "Two Caravans).
Life for migrant agricultural workers in England is no picnic but Irina and her fellow workers form a familial bond - one that is quirky and dysfunctional but very touching and well-drawn. A minor dispute with the field's farmer evolves into something close to a full-blown riot and the next thing you know Irina and her gang flee their trailers and embark on an adventure that takes them from Kent to a horrid chicken processing plant to London and Sheffield and points north. It isn't hard to think of Strawberry Fields as a contemporary Canterbury Tales - as played with an Eastern European accent and influenced by the comic sensibility of Monty Python. This is not to compare Lewycka to Chaucer by any means. But each character has a tale to tell (including a mongrel dog they pick up along the way - and Lewycka does a great job translating dog talk into English!) and their tales are funny and moving.
I cannot say that Strawberry Fields is a better book than Tractors in Ukrainian. They are both excellent but they are different in many respects though. Where Tractors focused on one family, specifically two sisters, Strawberry Fields has a much bigger cast. There were a couple of instances where the book lost some of its narrative power because it was diffused among too many characters. That said, Strawberry Fields manages to combine humor and whimsy in telling a story that could easily pass for tragedy. That is not an easy line to walk but Lewycka does so with skill and grace. The book's dedication "[t]o the Morecambe Bay Cockle-pickers" an accident where 21 migrant workers from China were drowned in the north of England indicates that Lewycka is well aware of the plight of Britain's invisible laborers.
All in all, I was very happy with Strawberry Fields. It was tragedy played as farce and when that is done well, as it was here, it can have a very powerful effect. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig


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