The English Student

This one was a miss for me.

It's a novel about a group of strawberry pickers, all immigrant workers, and their various trials and tribulations as they journey across England in search of stability, home, love, family. There's opinionated Yola and her Christian niece Marta; innocent Emanuel of Malawi; Tomasz, guitarist from Poland; Andriy and Irina, will-they-won't-they couple from Ukraine. I suppose the core of Two Caravans is the romance between Andriy and Irina, a miner and a professor's daughter, which as far as it goes is well done: the misunderstandings between the two are nicely choreographed through the narrative voice which switches between them.

But that switching is equally what ruined the book for me, because it doesn't just switch between the lovers; oh, no, we get the perspectives of every single character, often on the same page, which makes the book bitty and extremely disorienting - though it has to be said that each single voice is convincingly differentiated, if a bit one-note. Also, I get the impression that Two Caravans doesn't really know what it wants to be: a humorous and hopeful look at immigrant life? Then what are all these guns doing? A gritty examination of the State of the World? Then why are we getting the perspective of an actual dog? (I'm not joking. There are numerous passages related from the point of view of, and in the voice of, a dog.) A sweet love story? What's that scene with the chickens doing, then?

I just think that Two Caravans is trying to do too many things all at once, and failing at all of them. It was a frustrating read for me.