Marina is a 16-year-old girl who lives in London with her mother Laura, who is English, but just so. They’ve been abandoned by Peter, Marina’s father, and due to Laura’s financial needs, now live with Marina’s ancient Hungarian grandmother and great aunts (Rozci, Zuzsi, and Ildi, the formidable and great women of Hungarian/Transylvanian yore, the Károlyi sisters). Marina decides to go off to Combe Abbey, a very posh but bottom of the barrel English boarding school, in an effort to glean some of the very English ideals she has picked up from various romantic boarding school books. She leaves behind a semi-broken, semi-depressed and semi-adolescent Laura who is in a confounding mess of a life what with sleeping on a couch in her mother-in-law’s apartment and having a dead-end job as a receptionist and an even more dead-end affair with her boss.

Just when you thought it would get better, it gets worse as Marina becomes pitifully homesick even as she tries to fit in by allowing herself to date a lower-year boy with a famous father, and Laura finds that her cad of a husband is back in her life, reformed (so he says) and with cancer. In the midst of this all is a Hungarian-Czech history that weighs on the entire narrative — a great mysterious unknown constant that gives the story depth and intrigue. Or should have, at any rate.

One of the wasted strengths of the novel is the mirroring between mother and daughter. What was an effort to create meaningful parallels between the two became an inept back and forth of who wants to kill themselves more. Laura and Marina are so heavy-handedly mirrored that Laura’s weak character is completely blurred. Marina’s adolescent dilemmas are much too similar to her mother’s. The self-pity and self-absorption, so apt in an adolescent, are just irritating in Laura whose character as a grown woman is not able to balance the self-loathing and regret with any other redeeming quality.

For instance, in Marina’s case: “She is shy; clumsy; short; fatherless; scared of cats; and the dark, and the future. She is going to be a doctor but knows she isn’t up to it, and if she doesn’t get into Cambridge, her life will be over. And unbeknownst to anyone at Combe, she lives with old people in the little bit of darkest Hungary, like a maiden in a fairy story. Or a troll.”

And in Laura’s: “She stands naked, in front of the mirror and looks at her 41-year-old body; vigorously used by one or two unmemorable boys in the small Birmingham suburbs, then at teacher training college; desired by Peter Farkas but evidently not enough; utilised occasionally by Dr Alistair Sudgeon. Is that it? If one discounts all that is wrong with her, her height, her face, elephantine knees and big red hands, is it possible that anyone could ever find some of the rest of her attractive again? ... She lowers herself into the water ... Sadness seems to close around her. She thinks: I want more than this. I cannot go on like this. I cannot go on.”

Even as a mother, Laura’s portrayal lacks definition. Her hesitation to reach out to her daughter is inexplicable given that till Marina left for boarding school, the mother and daughter were extremely close. There are many such holes in the narration that perhaps are present to make Laura more ambiguous and complex but instead make her appear a lazily constructed character.

There is a great need for background for the Hungarian Károlyi sisters as well. They become caricatures, swooping in at regular intervals to say “tair-ible” or “von-dareful” as if their accents explain something that the author didn’t otherwise deem necessary. The book does a lovely job at the beginning of building suspense about their origins — there’s a romantic beginning in an Austro-Hungarian village, followed by a glamorous ascent to Vienna and London with college love and suffragette rights, and then there is espionage to smuggle passports during the war and finally a great lingerie empire built in London which mysteriously evaporates, leaving the Károlyi sisters to live on pensions and part-time jobs. It would have been wonderful to show these remarkable women who lived through these historic times in greater detail, instead of wasting page upon page on Laura’s self-pity. But they remain scattered, doing little else but providing comic relief or provoking terror in Marina and Laura.

The heavy handedness is also apparent in the last twist of the novel — where Marina’s older-man crush becomes a born-again nightmare for the family. But this, I believe is very much in keeping with the adolescent melodrama which is the theme of the book — a life so tragically comic has to have a fitting climax and Marina’s brief tryst with the age-old family adversary concludes in a very touching but theatrical end.

But the weakness of the plot is somewhat mitigated by the gifted prose. The ability of the writer to perfectly bring to fore Marina’s teenage angst as well as the lightness of tone in the narration makes what would be otherwise a slow double-bildungsroman, quite easy to read. There are times when the writing sparkles with genuine humour and poignancy. My favourite is when Marina goes to visit her very English boyfriend’s very English countryside house and meets his very famous and very English parents. She proceeds to make a complete idiot out of herself in trying to be charming but coming off as childishly gauche. It made me cringe for Marina’s naiveté because the writing so aptly brought out the rollercoaster of emotions she was going through. While she was trying to impress her hosts with her foreign heritage, she was in fact trying painfully hard to be almost English, which, as it turns out, is a bit of a hoax.

In an interview, Mendelson has said that she wanted to write about immigrants in London, and how their foreignness is actually about fitting in. In Almost English, we only see the immigrants as comic characters or at the most as figureheads of authority — we are never exposed to their complexities or what’s happening inside their minds. This is a real shame as there is so much wasted potential for storytelling and creating memorable characters. However, if you do read this book, read it for the brilliant insights into what Mendelson has called the private lives of people, especially young adults, and the emotional depth that the writer is able to channel.

Almost English (NOVEL) By Charlotte Mendelson Pan Macmillan, UK ISBN 9781447219972 400pp.