The Road Home was my choice for book group and one that was universally liked by the group with an average score of probably 8.5. It was heartwarming, moving, optimistic beautifully crafted and people just didn't want it to finish. the food the interiors and the friendships were what did it for me. the variety of Rose Tremain's writing is also really inspiring.
Observer review Below
On his interminable bus journey across Europe, bound for London, Lev practises his English: 'Excuse me for troubling you.' 'Do you have anything you could give me?' 'I am legal.' Lev's home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukaemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev, a former lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe's long-term unemployed, is travelling to London to find work.
Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dusty, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: 'I'm going to their country now and I'm going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck.' Things, however, do not start well: his first night in the city, spent in an Earl's Court B&B, uses up almost all his savings. On his uppers after only 24 hours, he gets a 'job' delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he's paid 2p a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate, lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wistful dreaminess.
For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.
Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, sometimes comic, often painful, journey through London, which Tremain uses to illustrate broader themes: how it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on others can induce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom's girlfriend, Larissa, a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia's country. Tremain handles this culture clash with adroitness and humour: sitting on Tom's lavatory, Lev relieves himself 'as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid'.
Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia's invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is forced to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend's feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.
Despite slowly improving circumstances, and the fact that he is now able to send money home, Lev's conscience tugs at him: his daughter, who has lost her mother, is now worried that her father, too, will never return, and the reader also begins to ask why he has really gone and what he is running from. For, in trying to escape the pain of grief, Lev has, ironically, inflicted an experience of terrible loss on his small daughter. All too slowly, he becomes aware of this dilemma and, as he wrestles with it, so the novel approaches its moving and satisfying climax.
Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dusty, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: 'I'm going to their country now and I'm going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck.' Things, however, do not start well: his first night in the city, spent in an Earl's Court B&B, uses up almost all his savings. On his uppers after only 24 hours, he gets a 'job' delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he's paid 2p a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate, lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wistful dreaminess.
For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.
Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, sometimes comic, often painful, journey through London, which Tremain uses to illustrate broader themes: how it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on others can induce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom's girlfriend, Larissa, a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia's country. Tremain handles this culture clash with adroitness and humour: sitting on Tom's lavatory, Lev relieves himself 'as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid'.
Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia's invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is forced to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend's feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.
Despite slowly improving circumstances, and the fact that he is now able to send money home, Lev's conscience tugs at him: his daughter, who has lost her mother, is now worried that her father, too, will never return, and the reader also begins to ask why he has really gone and what he is running from. For, in trying to escape the pain of grief, Lev has, ironically, inflicted an experience of terrible loss on his small daughter. All too slowly, he becomes aware of this dilemma and, as he wrestles with it, so the novel approaches its moving and satisfying climax.
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