Monica Ali’s disappointing second novel takes place in Portugal. This confuses expectations, because Ms. Ali’s reputation rests on her insights as a Bangladeshi immigrant to London. Her first novel, “Brick Lane,” took the point of view of a single immigrant woman, Nazneen. James Wood notably championed “Brick Lane,” writing that Nazneen’s traditional values allowed Ms. Ali to imbue her novel with the “gravitas” that makes 19thcentury novels so compelling.

“Alentejo Blue” (Scribner, 240 pages, $29.95), by contrast, features a multicultural ensemble cast. Like Zadie Smith, Ms. Ali here is interested in the aggregate effect of stereotypes that, while they exist simultaneously in the world, seldom exist simultaneously in one person’s mind (or book).The novelist becomes a custodian of sociological insights that most serious people would air at dinner but seldom bother to write down, except as fiction.

In eight chapters with eight points of view, and in a final chapter in which everyone comes conveniently together, Ms. Ali portrays the lives of locals, English tourists, and English ex-pats. Each of her characters has a blinking red light of a problem: obesity, unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality, writer’s block. As literary creations, they are flat, and the discontinuity of the narrative makes the novel feel thin. Meanwhile, the upshot of the characters’ coexistence is that everyone – not just the lame and hypocritical ex-pats – lives a squalid life. Tourism, Ms.Ali suggests, is not the problem – these people can muck their town up on their own.

If her first novel surveyed the success of traditional Bangladeshi values in the relatively loose world of London, then her second novel examines a locale that is already loose, and the book itself is correspondingly meaningless. And there’s little satirical payoff: This region of Portugal might as well be nowhere. As dark comedy, “Alentejo Blue” disappoints again: Ms.Ali evokes the squalid too willfully for that.We see a man kneel to pray in the toilet next to his dying wife’s hospital room:

Hail Mary, full of grace. The tiles were freezing. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women. On the door someone had written “Springsteen sucks.” And blessed is the fruit of they womb, Jesus. Another pen has added “cock.”

Holden Caulfield would have had something to say about that graffito. Ms. Ali simply mentions it, as pointed background information – a contradiction in terms, perhaps. The humility of the kneeling man’s situation is not delineated by the contrast, but poked. “Alentejo Blue”is like this: It reads like a joke that, as it leaves your lips, turns out to be less appropriate and therefore meaner than you had intended.

***

If, as Mr. Wood wrote in his review of Ms. Ali’s first book, the traditional structures of Victorian society justified and enlivened the “plottiness” of Victorian literature, it is also true that even if the trappings of Victorian society are simply delicious. The clothes, the presumptions, the educational institutions – for some readers, these are enough. So Jane Gardam’s highly entertaining “Old Filth” (Europa Editions, 295 pages, $14.95) finds its own way of bringing old literary values into the present by setting a walking anachronism, a judge who made his fortune in still-colonial Hong Kong, loose on the A1.

Named Old Filth, the judge is “spectacularly clean.” Ms. Gardam gives it to us the way we want it:

His ancient fingernails were rimmed with purest white. The few still-gold hairs below his knuckles looked always freshly shampooed, as did his curly still-bronze hair. His shoes shone like conkers. … Always a Victorian silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. Always yellow cotton or silk socks from Harrods; and some still perfect from his old days in the East. His skin was clear and, in a poor light, young.

Old Filth stands for “Failed in London Try Hong Kong.” When he appears in the Inner Temple, Old Filth is a living legend, whispered about. His near senility becomes an opportunistic stream of consciousness in Ms. Gardam’s hands; he takes in modern England, amazed, with an ex-pat’s sensibility. “If I had ever loved England, he thought, I would now weep for her,” Ms. Gardam writes, registering the touristic feel of an old estate Old Filth visits.

Ms. Gardam has been neglected in this country because her books are so “English.” Twice a Whitbread winner, her powers are evident in “Old Filth.” But in the end, her title character feels exaggerated. Ms. Gardam self-consciously borrows her story from Rudyard Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” the autobiographical short story that describes the bitter experience of English children, born to colonialist parents in India and shipped home for Anglicization at age 5. Old Filth, himself a “Raj orphan,” is far removed from the white-hot fury contained in Kipling’s story, and the disconnect between the two works becomes distracting.

“Old Filth” also recalls Colm Toibin’s quiet, tremendous 1992 novel, “The Heather Blazing,” about an emotionally removed judge. Mr. Toibin’s judge, Eamon Redmond, possesses a reserve both principled and particular: He is his own character, whereas Old Filth remains a lovable allegory for the empire in decline.

blytal@nysun.com