IN ANY AFFAIR THE SECOND date is always the most fraught — will there be enough to justify that initial attraction or will it be an emotional dead end? And for any creative artist the second encounter with the public is always the most nerve-racking.

In pop music, the follow-up to a blistering debut album is the most difficult to get right. Fans expect the same sort of sound — but with enough variation to prove that their idols are not just one-trick ponies.

Several young writers who enjoyed spectacular debuts have had troublesome second novels recently: both Zadie Smith and Monica Ali found the critical reception for their follow-ups less rapturous than the extravagant applause for their first.

Marina Lewycka is, in many ways, a different proposition from Smith and Ali. A mature university teacher with a grown-up daughter, she is not competing for a position on any Granta list of hip young gunslingers. But, like them, she basked in near-universal praise for her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. And, also like them, she proved herself to be a gifted handler of narrative with an assured comic voice, and a perceptive observer of the multicultural mosaic of modern Britain.

Lewycka’s second novel, Two Caravans, promises something of the spirit of her first — the cover art, the Eastern European characters, a consciously playful opening. But sadly, Caravans does not quite live up to expectations. It is not a bad book and has many redeeming features, but it flunks the crucial second-novel test.

I wanted to like it. I enjoyed Tractors immensely and felt an empathy for its author. I admire Lewykca for making economic migrants — the tabloid villains of our times — her heroes. But the likeability of an author and the nobility of her ambitions don’t guarantee success.

And Lewycka forfeited my sympathy fairly early by the irritating way in which she tries to extract humour from her ensemble of migrant workers by having them express themselves in broken, punning, English. She is trying, throughout, to have her poppyseed cake and eat it by manipulating our sympathy for her characters while playing their conversations for cheap laughs.

There is more than a whiff of Manuel from Fawlty Towers or Mind Your Language in the way that Lewycka goes for easy caricature of linguistic foibles — and although less pronounced, it does spill over into the characters’ internal dialogues too. This might be fine in a lighthearted novella; but it sits uneasily with the heavier themes that she is trying out.

Her migrants are supposed to illuminate the seamier side of Britain, taking us on a Dantean journey through the modern circles of immigrant hell — with strawberry farms where gangmasters exploit illegal workers, respectable restaurants sustained by Moldovan gangsters plotting people smuggling, and the red-light district of Sheffield. But the documentary detail is consistently undermined by the faux-innocent jauntiness of the narrative voices. It is as if Dispatches is being presented by one of the Cheeky Girls.

Caravans is also surprisingly poorly plotted. The original ensemble of characters thins quickly, as though Lewycka cannot cope with so many different narratives and perspectives. The moments of suspense in the second half rely on coincidences so unlikely that even Thomas Hardy might have felt uncomfortable with them and the resolution of a love affair whose ending we can see coming many miles off.

What makes the plotting and the central love affair drag even more is the rather heavy-handed levering in of politics, with two characters becoming propagandists for rival interpretations of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Much of the final stretch is a rather clumsy critique of “global capitalism”. At one point Lewycka even starts sympathetically quoting Marx, or as one of her characters calls him “cunning old bushy-beard”. The heavy political hand is at its worst in the reactionary whisky-sozzled middle-class English dad, who owes more to Paul Whitehouse’s Fast Show drunk than to acute social commentary.

So what’s to like? Well, some of the early plot twists are gripping, there is comedy in some of the earlier set-pieces, before the whole tricksiness of it becomes wearing. And underneath the clumsy humour and leaden preaching, one senses Lewycka’s talent struggling to assert itself. Perhaps now that the difficult second book is out of her system she can win us back to her side.

Extract from TWO CARAVANS by Marina Lewycka

“Irina, my baby, you can still change your mind! You don’t have to go!”

Mother was wailing and dabbing at her pinky eyes with a tissue, causing an embarrassing scene at Kiev bus station.

“Mother, please! I’m not a baby!”

You expect your mother to cry at a moment like this. But when my craggy old Pappa turned up too, his shirt all crumpled and his silver hair sticking up like an old-age porcupine, OK, I admit it rattled me. I hadn’t expected him to come to see me off.

“Irina, little one, take care.” “ Shcho ti, Pappa. What’s all this about? Do you think I’m not coming back?”

“Just take care, my little one.” Sniffle. Sigh.

“I’m not little, Pappa. I’m nineteen. Do you think I can’t look after myself?”

“Ah, my little pigeon.” Sigh. Sniffle. Then Mother started up again. Then — I couldn’t help myself — I started up too, sighing and sniffling and dabbing my eyes, until the coach driver told us to get a move on, and Mother shoved a bag of bread and salami and a poppyseed cake into my hands, and we were off. From Kiev to Kent in forty-two hours . . .

At Dover I was met off the boat by Vulk, waving a bit of card with my name on it — Irina Blazkho. Typical — he’d got the spelling wrong. He was the type Mother would describe as a person of minimum culture, wearing a horrible black fake-leather jacket, like a comic-strip gangster — what a koshmar! — it creaked as he walked. All he needed was a gun. He greeted me with a grunt. ‘Hrr. You heff passport? Peppers?’

His voice was deep and sludgy, with a nasty whiff of cigarette smoke and tooth decay. This gangster-type should brush his teeth. I fumbled in my bag, and before I could say anything he grabbed my passport and Seasonal Agricultural Worker papers and stowed them in the breast pocket of his koshmar jacket.

“I keep for you. Is many bed people in England. Can stealing from you.” He patted the pocket, and winked.

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