By Marina Lewycka
Penguin, NZ$37 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

FROM THE author of best-selling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian comes another tale of Ukrainians finding their way in Britain. Lewycka’s debut novel, narrated by a 47 year-old, British-Ukrainian woman, whose octogenarian father marries a voluptuous, Ukrainian gold-digger, was praised for its charm and hilarity. The characterisation and dialogue was fresh and original, the plot swift and the structure wisely straight-forward. These ingredients made for a highly successful first book – a hard act to follow, without appearing to repeat the formula. Lewycka seems aware of this and has perhaps over-compensated in Two Caravans, juggling five points of view, two fonts and three font sizes. This is a great leap from the safe territory of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Two Caravans begins in an English strawberry field. A gang of international pickers, from Poland, Malawi, China, Malaysia and, of course, the Ukraine, are living in two cramped caravans (one for the men, one for the women), eating their ration of bread, sausage, apricot jam, cheese and strawberries, and earning more than they would in their own respective countries in professional occupations. Yola, the Polish matriarch leads the team, encouraging the men to pick shirtless, in order to maintain ‘sexual harmony’, essential in a pleasant working environment. It’s not quite domestic bliss, but it’s OK, until young, beautiful, Ukrainian Irina arrives. Vulk, the greasy-ponytailed gangster agent, who has helped the pickers find work, takes a lecherous shine to Irina. Realising he could make more money from her if she were more exotically employed, he attempts to take her from the strawberry field. The abduction occurs on the same night that Yola’s affair with the farmer is revealed to the farmer’s wife. All hell breaks loose, which results in the pickers stealing the farmer’s Landrover, escaping with one of the caravans and travelling to Dover in search of Irina. Andriy, the other Ukrainian, is particularly eager to find her, having fallen madly in love with her dimples.

And so follows a series of fortunate and unfortunate events, in which the gang of pickers adopt a stray dog, find new jobs at battery hen factories and fishing wharves, and are, in varying degrees, led astray or taken advantage of. Lewycka’s riff on the difficulty of seeking one’s fortune in a country where one is barely legal and knows little of the language comes across loud and clear. Without Lewycka’s device of constantly changing the perspective, this theme could have become overbearingly preachy, but I suspect that her attention to specific detail and ear for comic dialogue would have been a sufficient screen. Her skill for incorporating miscellaneous facts, which was evident in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, is used to its advantage, especially in the chicken farming chapters. And her confidence at hamming up dialogue works effectively with bad-guy Vulk’s advances to Irina (‘No problema, little flovver’). However, Malawian Emanuel’s letters, written in over-blown broken English to his sister, jolt one out of Lewycka’s world, as do the bold, capitalised interludes where the dog gets his say. ‘I AM DOG, I RUN, I RUN FROM BAD MAN’, is perplexing to begin with, then cute, then grating. I can only explain it as an attempt to compare the plight of the misunderstood strawberry pickers to that of their stray dog. Though, why Lewycka felt this was necessary, I’m not sure. It could be argued that the cluttered style of Two Caravans mirrors the busy, chaotic lives of the characters, but this reading is a bit of stretch.

The best elements of Two Caravans are those that were also praised in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Lewycka’s talent for mimicry, eye for detail and understanding of how to spur a plot along are evident in both books. But, whether it’s due to a desire to experiment or to appear more ambitious, Lewycka’s second book is so crowded with voices and tones and jokes and references (Mr Mayevskyj from the debut novel even reappears for a cameo) that its strength is compromised. Although I wholeheartedly support writers who venture into new territory with their second novels, Lewycka’s venture has ended up looking more like an experiment than a development.