LEV arrives in England with his passport (he is a legal migrant), too little money and a photograph of the daughter he has left behind in the east. He also has with him a collection of his favourite fables.

These aren't much mentioned again but they provide a clue to the kind of book The Road Home both is and is not. At one level, it is a bittersweet fable about an innocent abroad, deficient in language, guileless, faced with archetypal tests and challenges. At another, it is a bluntly naturalistic account of two strangely converging cultures:

a Britain turned almost tsarist in its opulence and addiction to spectacle and Stalinist in socioeconomic function; a Russia that has abandoned both in favour of an "English" way that only ever belonged in a storybook.

It is a Russia without trees, which is why Lev and his friend Rudi have lost their jobs in the lumber yard. The friends are ironically twinned, one a Candide-like innocent, the other a bawdy cynic.

Lev's sojourn in London is punctuated with reveries of home, increasingly dreamlike, and occasional phonecalls which are, by contrast, dousingly down to earth.

Rose Tremain is far too subtle a writer to use symbolic oppositions like a clanging pair of cymbals.

They run through her narrative like harmonics. A Princess Diana postcard chimes ironically with an icon of the Virgin back home. Lev carries his book of folktales; his chance travelling companion on the bus . . . a translator named Lydia who befriends him . . . is reading The Power And The Glory. It takes time to realise both are about faith and loss. As with Joan Didion, Tremain's characteristic subject is disenchantment, her world one in which magic and realism are evenly and inseparably mixed.

The trees are gone at home and Lev has lost his wife to a cancer that seems like a malign, environmental spell. He may also briefly have lost her heart to her boss in the department of public works.

Procurator Rivas still haunts his dreams, a bad enchanter. In London, he finds cheap accommodation in Tufnell Park, lodging with the semi-alcoholic Christy Slane.

The book's chorus, a chastened Pangloss, Christy has lived alone since his wife tired of his drinking and took up with a trendy architect, another subtle parallelism.

Lev finds temporary work delivering leaflets for a kebab shop owner who believes that his act of kindness will gain him an extra virgin or two in Paradise. Then, thanks to Lydia, he gets a job . . . and in the process a lover . . . at GK Ashe, a hip restaurant whose eponymous owner perfectly embodies that tsarist/Stalinist divide of spirit.

Through Lydia, Lev comes into contact with an educated middle class whose superficial sympathy for the underdog is betrayed by its children's raw cruelty. Through his girlfriend Sophie, he is introduced to a world of fashion designers, artists and shock playwrights.

Two events turn his exposed innocence into rage. Lydia has been working as a translator for a distinguished Russian conductor in London. Lev goes with her to see Greszler conduct the great Slava Rostropovich but his new mobile phone goes off in his pocket and he flees in embarrassment. The call was from Sophie who, at the book's mid-point, takes Lev to the Royal Court to see a play whose central trope is a blow-up sex doll morphed with the face of the protagonist's daughter. Lev is outraged and reacts violently.

What follows might have been a descent into generic melodrama but is further testament to Tremain's ability to sustain both her themes and a convincing naturalism.

The Road Home is not an orthodox 'condition of the west' novel, nor is it a documentary about the new economic diaspora. Nevertheless, it provides an alert and humane profile of migrant labour.

Its real themes are friendship, love and loss, the shattering of illusion and flight from enchantment. Its tone is light and precise, never overtly serious or straining. It presents a life that is still, with the words in the appropriate place and spoken by the book's only articulate truth-teller, wild and beautiful and full of woe.