One of the best novels I've read this year
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I enjoyed this novel so much that when I was three quarters of the way through I went back to the beginning and started again! Tremain is an excellent writer. Her prose is full of colourful images and she has an eye for the quirky, the absurd, which makes for an entertaining read. In this tale the line between tragedy and comedy is finely walked. Lev is a beguiling hero - in many ways brave and admirable, but also flawed. His story is sad, sometimes brutal, but always handled with compassion. This novel could easily be read as a treatise on the plight of the immigrant worker - but it is more complex than that. Ultimately it is about the irrepressiblity of the human spirit and I loved it.
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Enjoyable but flawed prize-winning novel
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Rose Tremain is one of those British authors who has been on the periphery of my reading existence for about 10 years. She's been hard at work crafting novels -- 11 at last count -- and the odd short story collection, but I have only ever read Music and Silence, which won best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards. In fact, I adored that book so much, it may partially explain why I've shied away from reading anything else by Tremain: I've been scared that nothing else could live up to the beauty of my first experience reading her work.
I have had her 1992 novel Sacred Country in my reading queue for a year or so, but then she won this year's Orange Prize with The Road Home and I wondered whether it was time to give her another shot.
The story is essentially about an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country (I imagine it is Poland and wondered why Tremain had refused to just come out and say this), who arrives in London determined to make enough money to support his elderly mother and young daughter back home.
Lev is in his early 40s and still grieving over the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukemia, so there's a sense of melancholia about him. But he is also prepared to work hard and knows to get anywhere in life he must put aside his personal troubles and just get on with it.
Naively believing that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, he initially struggles to get settled, sleeping rough and making a measly fiver here and there by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. But his luck turns when he scores a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef (the fictional GK Ashe who has a touch of the Gordon Ramsay's about him).
With a little help from Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the long bus journey to London, he finds himself a room to rent in a house owned by the genial Christy Slane, a recently separated Irish plumber. Together Lev and Christy strike up a wonderful friendship, based partly on shared grief and the fact they both have young daughters of around the same age.
When Lev finds himself falling in love with Sophie, a colleague, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete, but it's really just the beginning of a complex, often bumpy, occasionally funny and constantly challenging journey...
Initially, I was gripped by this very human story. Lev is a remarkably likable and sympathetic character. I loved reading the descriptions of London through an immigrant's eyes, having been one of those myself a decade ago. But while Tremain makes his struggles quite tough, they don't always ring true. That Lev would find himself such a compassionate, helpful and friendly landlord, for a start, seemed unlikely. That he would land such a great job with so little English also seemed problematic. And his lack of friendship with other immigrants from his country -- aside from the slightly highly-strung Lydia -- seemed unrealistic. If you have ever been an immigrant you will know that you seek out others from your country, often without realising it, and congregate together, if only because the sound of a familiar accent (or language) is a comfort.
I had other problems with this book the further I got into it. There are inconsistencies in Lev's character (that he could be so violent towards a female in one particular disturbing scene and then be unable to fight off two 12-year-old muggers in another, for example) and there's a tendency to resort to immigrant stereotypes (the drunk Irishman, the fat curry-cooking Indian, the aloof and mysterious Chinaman). While it is clear that for much of the story Lev is living on the poverty-line, or surviving just beneath it, he still owns a mobile phone and thinks nothing of phoning his friend Rudi, back home: phone debt never seems to enter the equation.
But the thing that annoyed me most was the story's slide, somewhere after the half-way point, into a kind of rose-coloured upbeat fairy tale that had me guessing the ending 100 pages before it arrived. It was like Maeve Binchy suddenly took over the narrative and injected a bit of heart-warming sentimentality. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it effectively ruined what had been an extraordinarily realistic tale up to that point. Suddenly it changed tack and became a vastly different book to the one it had promised to be.
Perhaps I am being overly critical. Perhaps Tremain wanted to show that it is entirely possible to achieve your dreams if you get all the horrible stuff -- like struggling to survive on a minimum wage -- out of the way first. But the promise of the first 180 or so pages did not play out and by the time I reached the final page I was more disappointed than satisfied.
Still, despite these flaws, I enjoyed The Road Home and found myself underlining sentences that struck me with their beauty, such as: "Planes kept passing overhead, embroidering the sky with garlands of vapour." And this: "On the policeman's hip, his radio made sudden, violent sounds, like the coughing of a dying man."
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A marvellous book: moving and thought-provoking
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"The Road Home" is one of those books that succeeds in making you look at the world around you with new eyes. It's the story of Lev, a widower who immigrates from an unspecified country in Eastern Europe to the UK in the belief that it will be easy to find well-paying work there and thereby support his mother and child back home. Instead he finds that London is both considerably more expensive and less welcoming than he anticipates. Eventually he does find work and start to build some friendships, but it's far from an easy journey for him.
Rose Tremain makes us care about Lev and acutely communicates his loneliness and isolation. Occasionally he does things that we don't like, but he still maintains our sympathy and interest throughout. In fact, all of the characters in this book are perfectly realised and feel incredibly real. The first two thirds of this book in particular are beautifully written - this is one of those books that you carry around with you so that you can read a bit more whenever you get a chance.
My one criticism of the book is the ending, which worked on one level but felt too contrived and too neat on another. It was also telegraphed well in advance, so that when it did eventually wrap up it felt almost like an anti-climax rather than a culmination of all that had gone before. I loved this book very much, but the final third did not grab me as much as what had gone before. Nevertheless, one of my favourite books this year.
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So touching
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I found this book both so beautifully written that I longed to pick it up when I wasn't reading it, but also deeply humbling.
The story is centred around Lev, a 42 year old Eastern European who has a 5 year old daughter and whose wife died a few years ago. The book opens with the long bus journey from Levs country towards England to look for work and with only £20 in his pocket. We watch Lev stumble through his first few days looking for work, sleeping in the open air and delivering leaflets for £5 per day as he desperately tries to carve out a living so that he can send money home to his daughter and elderly mother. Through frequent flashbacks and conversations with his friend back home we also learn about why Lev had to leave and come to the UK to look for work.
This book (the first one I have read by Tremain - but certainly not the last) is not only exquisitely written but it had a much deeper effect too on making me think about how much we take for granted in the west. I loved every page, every word in fact.
I really can't recommend this book highly enough - it's moving, nostalgic and engaging and one I will remember for a long time.
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Migrant worker is lucky
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This book was riveting; as with other works of Rose Tremaine I was totally absorbed in her imagined world. I felt Lev was lucky to be so well supported from back home and by chance encounters on his journey. Many others are not so lucky.
An important book in reminding us of the humanity of our migrant workers, and how lucky we are to benefit from their hard work.
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