YOU WAIT AGES FOR A novel about Eastern European migrant workers, then two of them turn up in convoy. A few weeks ago Marina Lewycka’s second novel , Two Caravans, was published – a knockabout tragedy of Ukrainian farmworkers executed with formidable (if slightly conscious) charm tinged with melancholy. Now here is Rose Tremain’s The Road Home.

It tells the story of Lev, a charming but melancholy Pole, whom we meet en route from picturesque but poverty-stricken village life – his wife has died, leaving him with a daughter and a widowed mother to support, the sawmill has closed, leaving him jobless – to what he hopes will be a more prosperous existence in London.

On the coach travelling across Europe, Lev finds himself sitting next to a plump, mole-flecked woman called Lydia, also making her way to London, although she has job interviews lined up and friends to stay with.

“When they finally arrived in London,” Lev thinks, for all the strange intimacy of the 50-hour trip spent “side by side with their separate aches and dreams like a married couple . . . they would probably separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each alone and beginning a new life”. Rather than regretting this thought, Lev hugs it to him, as a reminder that, although he has left it to find work, his heart remains in his own country.

When the coach pulls in at Victoria Coach Station, he and Lydia do indeed part on the pavement, with a moment’s hesitation and a stab of regret as they set off towards separate futures. But, rather like a character in some old Eastern European fairytale, Lydia has left Lev with a token, a charm against bad luck on which to call if he finds himself in trouble. It is only a scrap of paper with a brief note and her mobile telephone number, and he almost throws it away, but instead tucks it into his wallet as he sets out to search for work.

There follows a London picaresque that, while executed in wholly, indeed sometimes grimly naturalistic style, contains the lineaments of fairytale within its structure.

The chance encounters with benign or malevolent figures who help or hinder Lev, the token bestowed on him by Lydia and the way that Lev invokes it in his hour of deepest trouble, the haunting of the lonely traveller by troubling images of the home he has left – all lend to Tremain’s narrative a plangent, almost savage sense of fable, an impression enhanced by the fact that both she and Lewycka send their characters to wander among some of the same scenes.

The protagonists of both books find work as gang-labour, picking fruit or vegetables by day, sleeping in caravans at night; both are drawn into fleeting intimacy with the inmates of an old people’s home, prompting reflections on kinship and the way that the British treat the elderly; both, in different ways, arrive at something resembling happiness ever after, the sweetness of resolution only faintly compromised by past trouble and future uncertainty.

Tremain’s publishers suggest that Lev is “perhaps Rose Tremain’s contemporary version of Candide” – a strange notion, for, at 43, Lev is no ingénu, nor is the intention primarily satirical, although she is interested in the strangeness of the British to an outsider.

An alternative comparison might be with George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Tremain shares some of his acute perception of the comforts of small things – a cigarette, clean sheets, a tabby cat asleep in a little London garden – and like him is interested in the power and contingency of friendship: Lev’s central attachments, stronger even than the ties of kinship or sex, are to his old friend Rudi, and to Christy, his landlord and comrade in the struggle to hold life together. There is, however, an unOrwellian tenderness – almost a sentimentality – in her handling of the protagonist, which insists on his essential nobility of character, and on the goodness of most of the people he encounters. The least convincing scenes are those of conflict: an uncharacteristically violent break-up with a girlfriend, and a bleak passage in which Rudi loses faith in his friend’s quest.

Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev’s passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn’t made her book uglier.

If The Road Home seems a slightly idealised version of a migrant worker’s journey (halfway through, Lev takes to reading Hamlet), it is a version filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor, the unattractive, the flawed and the dispossessed.

Chatto, £16.99; 320pp £15.29 (free p&p) 0870 1608080

Buy the book here

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