Almost English, by Charlotte Mendelson – review

Novels about growing up have two great themes: loss of innocence and the forging of identity. With this sparky, sharp-eyed and  often painfully funny novel, her fourth,  Charlotte Mendelson (winner of the Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes and now on the Man Booker longlist) explores both through the story of a girl and a family openly based on her own experience.

Marina Farkas is a small, round, dark-haired half-Hungarian girl of 16 (as the author was in 1988 when the novel is set). She lives with her fair, freckled, nervous English mother, Laura, in a small, hot flat in Bayswater; they have been taken in by three elderly émigrée sisters, Zzusi, Rozsi and Ildi, after Marina’s feckless, drunken father Peter, Zzusi’s son, vanished from their lives. He is presumed to be dead: Marina is adored, watched and controlled. They are short of money since the family lingerie business failed; Laura’s earnings help to keep them afloat.

She works for their GP, also married to a Hungarian, and carries on a secret and unsatisfactory affair with him. Both mother and daughter are in thrall to their Hungarian relations, and the novel is at its wry, observant best when presenting the infuriating but rather magical sisters, with their funny accents (‘darlink, vondairful’), their obsession with their native cuisine and their attempts to get Marina to wear bright, silky clothes (‘Vot a pity you don’t vont to look pretty’).

Marina loves them, but longs to get away and to be more like a proper English schoolgirl. She is clever, a bit of a swot, destined for Cambridge to read medicine and when she applies to do her A-levels in a boys’ public school in Dorset (Mendelson went to King’s School, Canterbury) she is accepted.