Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

April 6, 2015
The two picaresque novels collected in this volume—which are also the first two published novels from Man Booker Prize–shortlisted Levy (Swimming Home)—glimmer with dazzling flashes of fantasy and surreality. Beautiful Mutants (first published in 1988) is the tale of a Russian immigrant named Lapinski and her efforts to get by in a soulless modern London populated by the displaced and deprived. A subtle but scathing critique of Thatcher-era economic and social policies, the novel includes as its characters a profligate money-marketeer who sneers at the dispossessed, a llama in the London Zoo who advises an unemployed young man to “be a self-starter, be profit motivated,” and an employee at a frozen hamburger plant who, when she loses her hand in a meat machine, muses how “customers will buy my flesh in a sesame bun with pickle. They will sit in buses and not know that we have all started to eat each other.” In Swallowing Geography (first published in 1993), a restless young woman named J.K. goes on the road with her 1936 Smith Corona typewriter to record the personal stories of the colorful people she encounters, and to glean from them a means for rooting her own footloose life. “To have a home,” she realizes, “is to have biography.” Although fragmented and episodic, these exercises in the literary avant-garde resonate with moving reflections on exile and alienation.

May 1, 2015

These early works from Levy (Swimming Home) are populated with an assortment of rootless misfits, many eastern European in origin. In Beautiful Mutants, the orphaned Lapinski is sent by her Russian grandmother to England in search of a better life. But there she finds only menial work and people similarly at odds with the world. One gets by as a prostitute to support her young children, another works on an assembly line, while a third hangs out at the zoo, communing with the animals. Only Gemma, "The Banker," has brief success. Scenes are unpleasant but indelible--a pet bird lies perfumed and dead in a box under a bed, a man relishes having sex to a recording of machine-gun fire, and zoo animals burn up in a catastrophic blaze. Swallowing Geography stitches together a pastiche of similarly disturbing scenes featuring the nomadic JK; Lillian, her once elegant mother; and her friend Greg, who is dying of AIDS. Most of the other characters, identified only by initials, mix it up with well-known 20th-century personalities such as Trotsky, Lenin, and Franco. VERDICT As poetic as they are searing, these hard-edged early novels show the promise of things to come for readers arriving late to an appreciation of Levy.--Barbara Love, Kingston, Ont.

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