Customer Reviews

Two Caravans

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Marina Lewycka continues to mine the seam she opened up in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, of immigrants (mainly from Eastern Europe, but also some from China and Africa) coming to Britain - this time to earn money picking strawberries, working on a chicken farm, in a restaurant etc. The book shows how these immigrant workers are exploited: passports confiscated by the crooked and violent agents (Eastern European themselves), miserable wages, diminished by extortionate deductions for all sorts of things, including for the rent of the most awful accommodation. Very often migrant workers also cheat compatriots who trust them, and the prejudices that citizens of one East European country have for those of a neighbouring country are also well brought out. Illegal migrants from outside the EU who pretend to be legal immigrants from EU countries (e.g. Brazilians claiming to be Portuguese) are particularly vulnerable, as the gang masters well know. There is a horrific description of the way chickens are treated in battery farms.

As in Tractors, the sombre nature of their ordeals is `lightened' by humour, though I didn't think the book was nearly as funny as the earlier book. There is again the hilariously fractured English spoken by some of the immigrants, though one of the girls, Irina, speaks remarkably good English. (She is the only character whose story is told in the first person.) The book focuses in turn on eight particular workers (and, very tediously, on the thoughts of a dog who follows them around), but the characterization is fairly shallow, certainly compared with the richness of the four central characters in Tractors. Being young, a lot of their thoughts are about sex (the naive Malawian, who had been educated by Catholic nuns, is eager to acquire canal - sic - knowledge; the letters he writes home to his sister are a lovely blend of high-flown language and delicious errors); and there is a stop-go love-story about bourgeois Irina from the anti-Russian Western Ukraine and working-class Andriy from the Donbas mining region in the pro-Russian Eastern Ukraine.

The novel also has some of the characteristics of a road movie, as the characters travel up and down England in vans or caravans and meet up with various English `characters'. Towards the end, in a rather attractive section, they fall in with a group of tree-hut-dwelling eco-warriors. Less credible are the number of occasions when, in different parts of England, they run into the same sinister exploiters.

Having enjoyed A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTOR IN UKRAINIAN, I was looking forward to reading a book set in the strawberry fields of Kent.

The concept had potential, following the lives of the immigrant strawberry pickers, and their reasons for arriving in England, etc. However, the book seemed somewhat lacking.

I did not find any of the humor that was present in Short History of Tractors, and the characters were hard to like. I think I was supposed to feel bad for their working conditions and feel for their plight, however, I found each of their flaws too distracting to really care for them. The narration, in broken English, was also a distraction.

It was pretty implausible that they kept running into the same groups of people across the country, and, in the end, the story just seemed to stop. We never learned what happened to the various strawberry workers who left the main group throughout the book, and I was left with a feeling of blah...

Having enjoyed 'A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian' I was eager to read another by the same author, and 'Two Caravans' does not disappoint! Following on with the same immigrant theme the book provides a fascinating insight into the life of these people, and I applaud Lewycka for a well written (if not quite as good as her first) story.