The Secret Purposes David Baddiel Little, Brown, 416pp, £16.99 ISBN 0316725765

David Baddiel has a split personality. There he was on television during Euro 2004, in his customary place next to Frank Skinner on the sofa, looking sheepish but joining in with the laddish banter. Yet now, here he is again, the former Booker Prize judge with a double First from Cambridge and the author of a very serious novel. The man partly responsible for the lyrics "Three Lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/ Never stopped me dreaming" is attempting to seize the intellectual high ground.

Inspired by the experiences of his grandfather during the Second World War, The Secret Purposes centres on the internment of German residents in Britain, the majority of them Jewish refugees, in camps on the Isle of Man. The injustices suffered by these Jews at the hands of the British government deserve to be more widely appreciated, and this book is most effective when Baddiel allows the facts to speak for themselves. Not only did the British government suppress reports of increasing anti-Semitic atrocities in Germany, it also pursued a policy of interning German Jews residing in Britain - on the grounds that they might turn out to be Nazi spies.

As a fictional representation of these facts, however, The Secret Purposes does not always do them justice. One problem is the raw power of the original testimonies: it is hard for any novelist to compete with accounts that record, for example, "a crying baby silenced with a shovel in front of its mother". I found myself wanting to know more about the Isle of Man internment than I did about the sappy hero, Isaac, and his cliched band of supporting characters. Baddiel fails to make us feel genuinely sad about the separation of Isaac from his wife, Lulu, and it is only near the end of the novel, when the action skips to 2000 and we encounter a decrepit Isaac and his daughter Bekka bickering in their dotage, that the story acquires any real pathos.

Isaac, Lulu and Bekka flee Germany after Kristallnacht and live for a while in Cambridge, where Isaac, a trained scholar (the academic predisposition of Jews appears virtually axiomatic for Baddiel), works in the kitchens of King's College until he is removed to the Isle of Man. Lulu sets about collecting testimonies to his good character to facilitate his release, rebuffs a sleazy suitor who tries to exchange a faked testimony for sex, then vanishes from the book. Isaac, on the other hand, meets the spunky civil service translator June Murray, who has inveigled her way on to the island in order to corroborate reports of German atrocities that have passed through her hands at work. Predictably, the pair end up sleeping together.

The combination of the plot and Baddiel's style has "screenplay" written all over it, but this is also a novel of ideas, an opportunity for Baddiel to show off his literary credentials. Its main theme is liminal spaces and the crossing of boundaries: bridges, borders, race, creed, countries, language, fidelity and truth. In The Secret Purposes (the title is a quotation from John Donne), Baddiel demonstrates his command of language (English and German) as a means of crossing a boundary himself, a way of making clear his status as a serious writer. He illustrates convincingly the importance of language in developing a sense of belonging. Isaac never fully purges the German words from his English and remains baffled by idioms to the end; when he uses an English expression successfully, he is pleased to have taken another step towards assimilation.

Yet Baddiel wants to have his Kuchen and eat it: he succumbs to the lure of jokes (albeit upmarket ones) about farting and wanking. On the Isle of Man, Isaac tells a fellow internee that all Jews are interested in either show business or academia. The other internee suggests food as a third option, before conceding that "under pressure, everyone goes to what they know". The Secret Purposes shows how hard it is to leave behind what you know. Baddiel may yet prove that it is possible to succeed in two fields as far apart as literature and showbiz. For now, however, it is tempting to agree with Isaac's comment that this is "too standard a Holocaust story, cliched even, or at least not entirely felt, not entirely real".

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