Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-12
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Psychologies
'Tremain writes...prose that makes me want to give up writing as she's matchless. It's a beautiful and timeless work'

Sunday Telegraphy, Sally Cousins
`Rose Tremain touches a raw contemporary nerve in this well-judged tale'

Guardian, Catherine Taylor
`A novel at one rich and strange'

Customer Reviews

The road to salvation (7/10)
Rose Tremain's Orange Prize-winning `The Road Home` is a compassionate if somewhat conventional novel about a migrant worker from Eastern Europe who seeks a job in England to provide money for his family. Opening with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath, `The Road Home' is a contemporary take on the Steinbeck paradigm, depicting a new reality affecting thousands of people from poorer parts of Europe. As for many for whom an expanded EU offers hope to make a better life, Tremain's protagonist Lev heads for London. A 43 year old widower, Lev is forced to take his chances in the UK when work dries up in his town. A combination of the kindness of stangers and hard work give him the opportunity to save his family, who face destitution due to plans to build a dam that would flood his village.

It took me a while to warm to the protagonist, since he seemed more of a notional, idealised emigrant than a real person. Earnest, widowed, moral, and conveniently attractive, he seemed a bit too romanticised for my liking. But as the story develops, and we are afforded a little access to his memory, a more complex and tangible portait emerges: Lev's jealousy of a local beaurocrat, with whom he suspects his wife had an affair, has an aura of violence about it; and he has a couple of rages in the novel ("... that old anger of mine") that cross the line.

`Heart-warming' is not an adjective I'd normally use to describe the novels I like, but the sense of progress and optimism in `The Road Home' is infectious and moving without being excessivly sentimental. Tremain constructs her narrative with a deft economy indicative of her tenure teaching creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Sometmes, it feels a little too careful, the peaks and troughs of Lev's fortune mapped out a little too neatly. Also I found the novel's insistence of the humanity of the poor, and the general superficiality of the privileged, lacked subtlety. The London art circles Lev is forced to confront (during his romance with a social-climbing English colleague) are easy targets: predictably shallow and pretentious. That Lev can't relate to their wry remarks, or the crude metaphors apparent at the theatre and in the artworks he is shown, plays to the romanticised notion of the emigrant as earthy and authentic, untainted by cosmopolitan cynicism and wastefulness.

`The Road Home' engaged me most in the kitchen at GK Ashe, a restaurant that offers Lev his first proper job - washing dishes - but also a sense of direction and ultimately salvation. His initiation into the the catering hierachy is as compellingly told as his ignominous exit from it is palpably catastrophic. At first nicknamed `Nurse' to reflect his duty to keep things stringently clean, he describes "... the hot water, the grandeur of the steel surfaces, the fierceness of of the rinse-faucet ... the chefs hurled down mixing bowls, strainers, knives, stock pans, whisks and chopping boards". Compared to two other novels with depictions of kitchen life - Orwell's `Down and Out in Paris and London', springs to mind, as does one narrative thread in Kiran Desai's `The Inheritance of Loss` - the cleanliness and precision is almost surgical. Whereas in Desai's novel the kitchen is a hopeless dead-end for the immigrant underclass in New York, in `The Road Home' it briefly provides Lev a surrogate family with a brusque, patriachal boss. The meritocratic fair-play of the kitchen makes much more sense to Lev than the allegorical theatre and artworks his English girlfrien urges him to embrace.

A compelling narrative, then, but `The Road Home' lacks for me a tangible outsider's view of London. As a Londoner but now relocated to France, my home city becomes stranger and stranger each time I visist: increasingly transient, chaotic. I wanted to immerse myself in London as seen through the eyes of a stranger. Surely such a capital city would make a more profound impression (either positive or negative) on someone who had spent their entire life in rural Eastern Europe. Here Tremain's descriptive talents don't seem quite up to the task of conveying the awe and alienation you would expect. Contemporary Britain could be a fascinating literary canvas, but many authors seem to shirk from the task of capturing it's essence in the same way that American writers have long endeavoured to with their own nation. Blake Morrison did a fairly good job on `South of the River`, but I yearn to see something on the scale of Updike's Rabbit series, for example, written about the UK.

My first Rose Tremain - what a find!
Though the name has always been familiar to me, the author's work hasn't - I guess I've just never 'bumped into' one before. And how excited I now am to know I have her whole back catalogue to immerse myself in.

Lev,the Eastwern Eurpoean immigrant whose story this is, is an instantly engaging hero, and if you weren't captivated and rooting for him from the very first page then you must have a hard heart indeed. What a fine writer Tremain is; every little word, every observation, every line of dialogue, just perfect. So much insight into the human experience, and such an assured way of storytelling. Flawless. Now then. Which Tremain to read next? Suggestions from Tremain fans would be most welcome via my profile page!!!

Hugely Enjoyable
Engrossing, fascinating, well written and absorbing. Believable, catchy characters coupled with a very realistic and believable plot.

I thoroghly enjoyed this book. Buy it now and read it.