Given the extent of the economic migration from eastern Europe to Britain since the opening of labour markets in 2004, and the debates about freedom of movement across Europe that have continued to dominate the political agenda since the Brexit referendum, it is perhaps surprising that the experiences of these new arrivals have not been more thoroughly explored in fiction, at least in English. There are some notable exceptions – Rose Tremain’s The Road Home and the slyly comic novels of Marina Lewycka, herself the daughter of Ukrainian refugees – but for the most part their stories have remained untold, surfacing in print only as news bulletins and statistics.
I had high hopes, therefore, for Laura Kaye’s debut novel. Mirka is a 19-year-old from Slovakia who has broken with her family and come to England to make a new life. After a stint at a fast food restaurant in London she accepts an agency job as an “assistant” to Richard and Sophie Parker at Fairmont Hall, a decaying country house in the middle of nowhere. The only stipulation made by her future employers is that she is not squeamish about touching dead animals. Mirka assumes she will be a cook or perhaps an au pair, but when she arrives she discovers that the couple have no children. She has been hired to help in Richard’s latest money-making scheme: a taxidermy business.
Initially as unnerved by the dead bodies of the animals as she is by the Parkers’ drunkenness and dubious hygiene, Mirka is gradually drawn deeper into Richard and Sophie’s lives. The pair have a stormy relationship and it clearly suits them to have Mirka there to defuse the tension and give them each someone else to talk to. Mirka is a hard worker, cooperative and uncomplaining. She helps with the weddings that Sophie organises at the house. She even turns out to be something of a whizz at taxidermy. Soon she is pursuing her own projects, creating elaborate tableaux of animals dressed in human clothing which find an enthusiastic market in London. Everything seems to be going swimmingly until Mirka falls in love with Sophie and discovers, to her shock, that her feelings might just be reciprocated.
The novel is a strange hybrid, both determinedly contemporary and oddly old-fashioned. Sophie and Richard are chaotic, good-hearted Sloanes in the Jilly Cooper tradition: they drink vast amounts, organise pheasant shoots, adore their dogs, live in borderline squalor, and enjoy nothing more than a party where they and their friends can dress up in hilarious costumes (used Tampax, anyone?). They are also, despite some of their more preposterous excesses, very real. Kaye has an ear for convincing dialogue, and Sophie, in particular, is vividly imagined. Lonely and bored in the depths of the countryside, she is restless in her marriage and hungry for excitement and attention.
Where Kaye falls frustratingly short is in her characterisation of Mirka. The book’s blurb draws comparisons between English Animals and such classic novels as I Capture the Castle and Cold Comfort Farm, but, although all three books share a young female protagonist, Mirka Komárova has little in common with intelligent, spirited Cassandra Mortmain or the indomitable Flora Poste. Unlike her fellow chroniclers of anarchic country life, she is a shadowy, indistinct character. Early in the novel we learn that she is gay, that she left Slovakia at least partly because of her mother’s refusal to accept her sexuality, and that she has already had a relationship with a much older woman. Through the next 300 pages we discover almost nothing more. When life with the Parkers startles her, which it frequently does, Mirka offers us no comparisons with her old life, no insight into the tensions and complications of leaving one’s country and beginning again somewhere else. She appears to have come to England with nothing, not even herself.
This problem is compounded by her shortcomings as a narrator. While Cassandra is not unreasonably condemned by an adversary as a “nasty noticing child”, Mirka’s observations tend towards the surface of things. Her descriptions of the England she encounters are precise rather than perspicacious, full of details that never quite become truths. Perhaps if the book were driven by a page turner of a plot this sketchiness would have mattered less. As it is, the absence of a living, breathing protagonist robs it of its heart. English Animals resembles too much the taxidermy “scenes’ Mirka takes so much time and trouble creating, a painstakingly assembled facsimile of life rather than life itself.
• Clare Clark’s latest novel is We That Are Left (Vintage). English Animals is published by Little, Brown. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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