The Road Home - Rose Tremain

...with her grandmother and makes the long coach trip from Eastern Europe to London, hoping to find a job that will enable him to earn enough money to send home to make a better life for Maya. With the help of Lydia, a fellow passenger, he slowly starts to find his feet in London, renting a room from Christy, an Irishman with his own personal problems, and landing a job - though menial - in one of the city's most prestigious new restaurants. Things ...
...how different life is from the one he left behind.


'The Road Home' is a thought-provoking and engaging read that I found instantly compelling. It is not specified which country Lev comes from which turns out to be an important omission because this is only partly the story of an experience of immigration. While that forms an intrinsic part of the novel, it's also the story of Lev, his friends and his home town regardless of ... more

When he is made redundant from his town's saw mill, widower Lev leaves behind his young daughter with her grandmother and makes the long coach trip from Eastern Europe to London, hoping to find a job that will enable him to earn enough money to send home to make a better life for Maya. With the help of Lydia, a fellow passenger, he slowly starts to find his feet in London, renting a room from Christy, an Irishman with his own personal problems, and landing a job - though menial - in one of the city's most prestigious new restaurants. Things start going well for Lev until suddenly he is reminded just how different life is from the one he left behind.

'The Road Home' is a thought-provoking and engaging read that I found instantly compelling. It is not specified which country Lev comes from which turns out to be an important omission because this is only partly the story of an experience of immigration. While that forms an intrinsic part of the novel, it's also the story of Lev, his friends and his home town regardless of where exactly that might be. There is so much more to Lev than his experience as an immigrant.

However, the experience of (not just) economic migrants does form a central and fascinating pillar of 'The Road Home'. Rose Tremain handles this with great humanity; there are several incidents where Lev gets into trouble because of some linguistic or cultural misunderstanding and these incidents are thought-provoking reminders of the obstacles foreigners encounter when learning to live in a new culture. I was gladdened by the way she tackles this because I feared that it might be done in the same way that Marina Lewycka looks at cultural differences in her novel "Two Caravans" that also focused on the experience of migrant workers in the UK and which I found crudely slapstick in places.

Instead the book's humour comes mainly from the phone calls Lev makes to his friend Rudi back in Baryn and the stories Lev tells his new friends about Rudi and the almost clapped out 'Tschevi' that is Rudi's pride and joy. I loved Rudi's blind optimism and the almost always misguided advice he doles out to Lev about Britain even though he has barely set foot out of his own town.

The cast of characters are all beautifully crafted if a little predictable at times. Lev is a complex character who I often found surprising but never boring and certainly never incredible. Too often we think about immigrants as a group rather than a series of individuals and I think Rose Tremain does an exceptional job of reminding us that. It would have been easy to create a perfect Lev, a man who wanted to earn his money and send it home, keeping his head down and enduring the hostility that all immigrants experience from some quarters. However, I believe that the author actually stirs things up a bit by making Lev fallible; sometimes he does things that are really quite awful but it never turns the reader against him.

The story is entirely told from Lev's point of view but it doesn't make the other characters any less real and Tremain still manages to cleverly allow us to see things from the point of view of other characters whether that's through the phone calls between Lev and Rudi or the long chats that Lev has with his landlord Christy.

As well as being an account of an immigrant's experience 'The Road Home' is a novel that raises questions about our priorities and how we treat others in order to get what we want. It considers - albeit indirectly - the economic differences between different classes and cultures in what could be construed as a polemic against modern life. While his family scrimp at home Lev spends nearly two hundred Pounds on a suede jacket to wear to a theatre premiere, a jacket that eventually ends up in a dustbin; meanwhile immigrant workers earning barely the minimum wage are breaking their backs picking asparagus in the east of England while GK Ashe's (an obvious allusion to Gordon Ramsey with this character) chefs are earning upwards of £17 an hour to cook it.

I found the first two thirds of the story worked really well and relished every page even if I did find one or two minor flaws. One was that Lev didn't really engage much with the immigrant community like most people in his situation tend to but it's not a point worth quibbling too much over. The other was that Lev repeatedly tells people that back home people aren't interested in good food, something I really felt was incorrect. While eastern European food might be considered quite homely and plain in contrast with many other international cuisines I would argue that - at least in the parts of Eastern Europe I have visited - people are very proud of their culinary heritage and it is possible to eat some excellent food.

The final third of the book descended into an unfortunate spiral of predictability interspersed with a few incredible elements that disappointed me. It was as if the author suddenly lost confidence in her story-telling skills and just couldn't work out how to successfully conclude the story. Here it oozed sentimentality and became the sort of book I had feared it might have been all along.

I did enjoy 'The Road Home' even if the ending was a let down; for me the fact that I read it in what amounted to just a few hours means that I found it instantly engaging and worthwhile. I might even describe it as a 'Pilgrim's Progress' for the modern day, with Lev, representing Christian, encountering people and situations that test his faith in himself and others (though some might say I was over-dramatic in my comparison). If it were not for the occasional quite graphic sexual scenes I might even suggest it is a book which should be read by older schoolchildren in order to understand better the reasons foreigners come to the UK to seek work and a new start. It should certainly be given away with the Daily Mail!

'The Road Home' is a satisfying and enjoyable read first, a thought-provoking and intelligent look at the experience of economic migrants second.
320 pages 

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