Customer Reviews

The Road Home: A Novel

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4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
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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 daughter 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 the book. In fact, all of the characters are perfectly realized and feel incredibly real. The first two thirds of "The Road Home" 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. It made me think about (and care about) the experiences of immigrants in a new way.

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 favorite books this year.

Two months after its publication, everybody ought to be talking about THE ROAD HOME. It ought to be the book of the year, and it isn't. It's my book of the year, though. I dreaded an uplifting parable of the Immigrant Experience. What I got was a hero of such specific integrity, depth, decency and pain that his journey becomes not simply the story of a stranger in a strange land, but a revelation of the truths "foreigners" tell us about ourselves.

When the sawmill where Lev worked closes down ("They ran out of trees"), he leaves Auror, his (fictional) village somewhere in Eastern Europe, entrusting his young daughter to his mother's care (his wife has died, tragically young). In London, some people are kind to him; others, casually cruel: "This is how these people see me," Lev thinks at one point, "as a turnip with no intelligence and no voice." He never comes off as a victim, though. He finds a rented room and a job washing dishes in a chic restaurant, and ultimately discovers a passion and talent for cooking that he parlays into a dream for the future --- and a pathway back to his homeland.

Lev is almost old-fashioned in his sensibility (and even in his vices, cigarettes and vodka). In teeming, driven modern London, he is allergic to the brittle, pseudo-creative denizens of the culture of cool. But he seems to have an instinct for connecting with those who appreciate his discipline and understand his lingering sadness (it's no accident that he improves his English by struggling through HAMLET; it's as if the ghosts of Auror have followed him to Britain).

Probably my favorite moments in the book are set in the restaurant. Rose Tremain evokes the controlled chaos, pinpoint timing and near-military precision of a professional kitchen --- it's run like a small autocratic state --- in several brilliantly cinematic scenes. What's exciting is to watch the evolution of Lev's taste: his first encounters with refined cuisine (Auror is not known for four-star bistros), his experiments with cooking, and finally his fantasy of a restaurant of his own. There is an affection for food here --- what it is, what it does, where it comes from --- that makes THE ROAD HOME a nourishing novel as well as a moving one.

I was enthralled, too, by Tremain's dense, Dickens-sized cast of fully realized supporting characters. To name a few: Rudi, Lev's volatile friend back home, a taxi driver whose temperamental secondhand "Tchevi" is a symbol of the U.S. as another "promised land." Lydia, Lev's accidental companion on the bus to London, who develops a crush on him and is often his reluctant savior. His landlord, Christy, a good-hearted, alcoholic Irishman whose wife has left, taking their daughter. The staff of the restaurant, most significantly Lev's lover, Sophie ("Hardly anybody is good," she tells him. "But you are"). The Indian woman Christy courts. The elderly residents of the nursing home Sophie and Lev visit on Sundays. The Suffolk farmer, Midge, "lonely lord of his fruit and vegetable kingdom," who hires Lev as a picker.

Tremain's complex, imaginative people are certainly part of her literary gift, but she also gives them splendidly authentic landscapes to inhabit and big questions to grapple with. I've read five of her eleven novels, and what's astonishing is her range. She writes wonderful historical fiction that is both intimate and panoramic: RESTORATION and MUSIC & SILENCE are set in the 17th century; THE COLOUR is a tale of the 19th-century gold rush in New Zealand; the provocative SACRED COUNTRY, with its transsexual themes, ventures into bold new territory; and THE WAY I FOUND HER is a sophisticated coming-of-age story set in Paris.

THE ROAD HOME, though modern in subject and style, has something of the 19th-century novel about it (that's a compliment). It's meaty, ungimmicky and transporting. Its picaresque plot unfolds without strain as Lev shapes his expatriate existence and mourns his wife and former life. Perhaps the ending is a bit neat. As the title suggests, Lev does in a sense come full circle. But is that a bad thing? (Ambiguous or downbeat endings, I think, are overrated.) Would it have been better for Lev to die --- like his wife, like Hamlet --- or remain a lonely exile? I don't think so.

Although THE ROAD HOME is set in Great Britain, its lessons certainly apply to our own country. A nation of immigrants, it is also a place where someone of a different culture may be treated with loathing and suspicion, as an alien "type" rather than a person. Without being in the least preachy, Tremain shows us ourselves --- the good, the bad and the unforgivably ignorant --- through Lev's eyes. Reading her book has already made me more generous and less suspicious as I ride New York City's multi-ethnic subways. Squeezed into a crowded rush-hour car, I remind myself that the exotically dressed stranger beside me undoubtedly has, like Lev, a human story that should invite not fear but compassion.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Do publishers not want to sell books? The hardback cover shows a faceless street in far-from central London, bedraggled shoppers walking past gray concrete buildings blurred by the streaming rain. The opening description is not any more enticing: a fortyish man from some Eastern European country, widowed and out of work, journeys to London by fifty-hour bus to try to make money to support his mother and young daughter. He finds a city more expensive, less hospitable, and more xenophobic than anything he could have imagined. Within days, he is sleeping under somebody's basement steps.

But he also finds a few unexpected acts of kindness, like the Moslem cafe owner who gives him a temporary job and a free meal. Our hero, Lev, turns out to be a resilient person with a lot of determination and a sense of humor -- humor that (once he gets a cell phone) he shares with a friend back home, a crazy optimist who sees him through some bad times. Before long, the book that I was reluctant to read had become the book I could hardly put down. There have been numerous accounts of new immigrants to Britain, notably Zadie Smith's WHITE TEETH and Monica Ali's BRICK LANE, but this is unusual in being seen from an Eastern European perspective. It is also unusual in that Lev never intends to stay in England. Even though he makes some very good friends in London (including a passionate lover), part of his thoughts remain with his family. The book thus becomes a sensitive study in love and loneliness, as the road home leads through some strange detours.

My one problem with the book is a certain inconsistency of tone. Tremain's realism tends to be grittier than life and her upbeats correspondingly more glowing; in this, she is a little like Dickens, a fabulist, a romantic at heart. Lev has some reversals, especially painful when they are his own stupid fault. But on the whole he is lucky, finding jobs in various aspects of the food business and employers perceptive enough to see his strengths. His discovery of good food is a revelation after a life of communist rations. As his skills increase, he takes pride in his new metier and uses it to share his joy with other people. Among these are the residents of a retirement home whose menus (written by his teenage assistant) he enlivens with dishes such as "Chef's fantastic fish gratin with zero bones and non-crap crumb." Despite its familiarity with the underside of London life, THE ROAD HOME eventually plays out as a kind of fable, with Lev as an unlikely Cinderella, whose good fortune comes to him by hard work and the slow emergence of qualities that were in him all the time. [4.5 stars]

The Road Home, which was released yesterday, August 26, has already been awarded the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Sometimes I read a book that has won a prestigious award and I come away wondering why it won, or I may understand why, but award or no, I just didn't like the book. Not so with The Road Home. It is completely deserving of the Orange Prize and I loved every page of it.

Rose Tremain has given us a poignant, perfectly crafted novel. It is beautifully written. The plot ambles along at a relaxed and steady pace, but never once did I lose interest. I attribute this to two things. First, the compelling characters and Tremain's ability to draw the reader in, to make us emotionally invested in what happens to these rather ordinary people.

Lev ... I really liked this guy. And by the book's end, I knew him so well. Lev's journey to London and the life he lived there made the immigrant experience so real. The competing cacophony of emotions: he was hopeful, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, sad, at one point blissfully in love. He felt he was betraying those he left behind just by being in London, even though he was there to make life better for them; if he enjoyed life in his temporary city, he felt guilty. I felt Lev's frustration with the language barrier. Reading about how he was treated as somehow inferior just because he dressed differently, had different mannerisms, struggled to understand and make himself understood made my heart break with sympathy.

There were other characters who I grew to care about, and surprisingly most were men. I sometimes find it difficult to warm to adult male characters. But in this case, I quickly came to adore Rudi, Lev's brash and reckless, yet big-hearted old friend and Christy Slane, Lev's sweet, easygoing, down on his luck London flatmate.

The second thing that stands out about this novel are the descriptions of the two central places: London and the unnamed Eastern European country Lev comes from. The richly textured images Tremain so masterfully creates stand alone, but are especially meaningful when viewed in contrast. Lev's home country, struggling to feel hopeful after the fall of communism seemed bleak, faded, gray, sadly downtrodden. London, a frenzied melting pot, at times glamorous and sophisticated, at others gritty and ordinary, but always colorful and alive.

The characters and images in this highly readable, exquisitely written book will remain with me long after I turned the last page.

The odd thing about "The Road Home" is that by the end, most of the characters are far better off than they could have predicted, but the only people really happy are Christy and his new wife. It seems to me this is not because Tremain is trying to make a point about the dislocations caused by the changes in Eastern Europe, but because she was not sure what kind of novel she wanted to write. At the same time, Tremain does very well with dialogue, is inventive with plot, and has nuanced characters. The scenes inside Ashe's restaurant, and at the home for seniors were particularly good.

I approached Rose Tremain's The Road Home expecting a vivid story drawn on a life of struggle, whose central character might grapple with life's traumas, opportunities, joys and disappointments. I also expected that all of this would be placed in a setting where landscape, physical, social and psychological, but perhaps not political, would both inform and influence the characters' lives. I was not disappointed, but for the most part I remained less than surprised, apart from the fact that Rose Tremain in The Road Home approached a contemporary political issue.

The Road Home has modern day economic migration at its core. Lev is Polish. He has worked in a sawmill in his home town, the less than prosperous Baryn. He has a family and he used to be married. But now, as a single parent, despite the assistance of friends and family, he finds there is no future at home, no visible means of support. So he leaves for London on a bus in search, presumably, of streets paved with gold.

On that journey he meets Lydia, a compatriot with connections and in some unlikely way or other they manage to stay in contact throughout the book. Clearly their lives were never meant to intertwine, but circumstance, in The Road Home, is forever a local confinement. It simultaneously restricts and empowers, and then conspires with time to create a bond of friendship between Lev and Lydia that transcends class, interest, geography, expectation and assumption.

Rose Tremain's story takes Lev to different jobs, a kebab shop, two quite different restaurants, an old people's home and a vegetable form. She has him encounter low life on the street, the high-brow in a concert hall, and also the other-worldly in a theatre. He spots pretence - it might not be that difficult! - but he also appreciated sincerity. He encounters self-obsession, honesty and love, always in unequal measure in every aspect of life. Eventually, his travels become both self-revelatory and enriching. He comes to terms with loss and turns the void in his life to personal gain.

There is no fairy-tale get-rich-quick ending for Lev. The Road Home is no sugary advertisement for individuality, no attempted apology for market capitalism. This is a personal quest to cope with personal tragedy and unacceptable economic reality. The road does eventually lead home, but only when Lev and his destination have both been transformed. In their own way, neither is the same as they were at the start. And, I suppose, that's the point. Life takes us wherever it goes. As it drags us along, either we learn and survive, or merely survive, or not. The process is given. The result is speculative. Lev survives. And he learns. He is a credible, real character, with a credible, real life.

But there were aspects of The Road Home that I found disappointing. The scenario that adopted Lev at his destination was, for me, too isolated. Migrants often rely heavily on networks, but Lev has no contact save for Lydia, whom he met on the bus. He has no relatives to phone, nor friends, nor relatives of friends, nor someone from his home town who knew someone from somewhere else who just happened to be in business in Essex. This I found unlikely. In a literary sense, this liberated Lev from his background and thus enabled Rose Tremain to layer upon his experience exactly what she wanted. This was convenient.

It also rendered Lev's point of view wholly individual. He apparently experienced everything in the naiveté of complete isolation, the foreignness of British behaviour thus presented as if seen in a laboratory analyst's test tube. In this context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rose Tremain used Lev's trials and tribulations merely as a vehicle to let off some steam about aspects of contemporary British culture that she finds abhorrent, embarrassing or reprehensible. This, and not Lev's economic migration, is the rather failed political aspect of the book.

Christy, Lev's Irish live-in landlord, was rather more stereotypical than he needed to be. A plumber with a broken marriage and a drink problem might be plausible, but the last Irish plumber I met in London had so much work he earned a fortune and owned several London houses on which he collected rents. Maybe his name was Christy.

Lev's relationship with the eventually predictable Sophie also seemed unlikely. They worked together in a ground-breaking new restaurant, encountered the pretentiousness of a cutting-edge playwright and together even got involved in some social conscience. I would have no criticism here if Lev, throughout all this experience, had seemed more engaged, rather than experiencing everything as if he were merely a recipient. Out of your own context and background, you have the opportunity, even the right, to be super-opinionated, and this is a right that Lev seems to forego.

Overall, The Road Home is an excellent read. Its characters are engaging and its events are eventually both credible and poignant. I felt, however, that it lived too much outside its principal figure's psyche. But then it chose to concentrate on his experience of change, one aspect of which is travel, itself, rather than his responses and judgments. Sometimes travel itself intensifies responses, and it is possible that Lev's experiences explore this aspect of experience. So when he returns home, as the book's title requires he does, he is a changed man. But now he is also newly skilled, enriched and motivated. The Road Home does more than a little of that for the reader as well.

I became a Rose Tremain fan after being entralled by the first novel I read by her: Music and Silence. But the next three Tremain novels were hit-and-miss for me: liked Restoration, hated The Way I Found Her, found The Colour absolutely ho-hum. When I heard that The Road Home had won the Orange Prize, I thought I'd give Tremain another try...and I am so glad that I did.

It has been a long time since I was so entralled by a novel and came to care so much for a protagonist. A month after finishing the book, I find my mind wandering back to Lev's adventures in England. The Road Home is a great novel and also a great work of art. An engaging plot that moves the novel rapidly forward, a rich array of wonderfully-depicted characters not one of which is superfluous, writing that is beautifully crafted and lucid and always readable. Plus, this book has much to say about the New Europe.

Those who are hostile to the idea of economic migration should read this novel. I defy them not to root for Lev!

Tremain, Rose. The Road Home. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007.

This is the story of Lev, a widower who immigrates to England from an unnamed Eastern European country. Tremain's graceful prose, richly described setting details, absorbing story, and fully developed characters take me away from my privileged and prosaic little world into Lev's world, a world once veiled by the Iron Curtain, with unpronounceable names that have too many consonants. A world where the "gray" market flourishes as West meets East through streetwise entrepreneurs. A world where fish sometimes glow in the dark and young women too often die of leukemia, where the electricity may or may not work, where a refurbished bicycle is a primary means of transportation, where sawmills routinely "run out of trees". A world used to deprivation.

From the ten hour bus ride to London to the short "road home" at the end, I was captivated by Lev, an endearing, lovable, honorable, flawed, quintessentially human man. I was equally captivated by the London he occupies and the company he keeps there. We have the pretentiously named G.K. Ashe, known as "Chef", owner/proprietor of a five-star restaurant; Lydia, Lev's seat mate on the long bus ride, a warm and generous woman with "moles like splashes of mud on her face"; Sophie, whose plump arms (and rough sex) catch and keep Lev's attention, after five years of celibacy following his wife's death from cancer at age 36; Christy, Lev's Irish and alcoholic landlord-cum-friend, whose ex-wife seems to have Amazonian qualities. And Rudi, Lev's link to home--Lev finds solace and respite in memories of a lifetime with this cheerful, resilient childhood friend. Rudi's vibrant personality fills the crevices of Lev's homesickness, providing much-needed laughter through both memories and infrequent phone conversations. Rudi's "Tchevi", an ancient Chevrolet Phoenix (a car I neither remember nor could track down), provides local taxi service back home; Rudi keeps the car running through sheer grit. The car itself is a minor character, a vehicle (pardon the pun) through which we see the routine shortages of Lev's home country--and the routine resourcefulness of its people.

This is a socially conscious novel, to be sure. We can't miss the poverty and despair that force Lev to immigrate, but we are drawn into the universal themes of life, his and ours--love, loss, grief, injustice. We identify with Lev even as we are fascinated by his "other-ness."

Tremain's award-winning novel uses old-fashioned pacing, characterization, and narrative panache to stretch our sound-byte-jaded attention spans, wooing us into "something wild and beautiful and full of woe."

This is a touching and charming novel about Lev from an unnamed Eastern European country in the EU. He is 42, has recently lost his much loved wife Marina and then lost his job when the sawmill in which he had been working closed down. With a wrench he has left his five-year old daughter Maya with his mother Ina, and has set off from his village to find work in London, with a view, of course, of earning enough to send back to Ina and eventually to take `the road home' himself. He has at first very little English, and, unlike his friend Rudi back at home, he is a dreamy and not very obstacle-conquering person. During all the things that happen to him in England, his mind goes back to memories of the life and the people he has left behind, and every now and again he spends some of his hard-earned money on mobile phone-calls to Rudi, whose early ebullience ebbs away in the face of problems besetting him and the village. So the book is a series of evocative vignettes of English and of East European life; and these show a fabulous inventiveness (or perhaps the weaving together of a great range of Rose Tremain's memories or experiences), but each of them rings true.

And what happens to him in London? Anything from kindness through indifference to hostility. But actually most of the people he is in contact with are friendly. He finds work as a washer-up in a posh restaurant. The work is tiring and the owner is exacting, but also appreciative of his workers when they achieve the fiercely high standards he demands: this isn't exactly the mean and unscrupulous exploitation described in Marina Lewycka's `Two Caravans' (see my review - as in that novel there is also in this one a section on immigrants of different nationalities working on a farm). The atmosphere of this book is much kindlier. Lev learns much from his work in the restaurant; and food and cooking will play an enormous role in the book - nourishing in many more senses of the word than one.

All sorts of people befriend Lev: a compatriot who wants to take him to an Elgar concert; his unhappy Irish landlord whose wife and child have left him; a playwright who tries to explain `transgressive theatre' to him; a young woman who makes `ironic' hats for, among others, the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie - all these talk to Lev, making no concessions to his still limited vocabulary, using slang expressions or words which he only partially understands, so that he feels clumsy, inadequate, angry - and lonely. Some women seem to be fond of him, but, still grieving for Marina, for some months he stiffly resists their advances.

Then comes a chapter significantly entitled `Why Shouldn't a Man Choose Happiness?" and the ones that follow are very moving.

We are half way through the book, and then everything shifts again, and it would be a spoiler if I described how. Suffice it to say that after the warmth of encountering "genuine" people, he comes up against a smart set who acclaim transgressiveness, and a particular example of it, in a way that is deeply shocking to him, and that plunges him back with a vengeance into his sense of alienation, with heartbreaking consequences.

But he recovers, and he gives himself a mission of what he hopes to do for his neighbourhood when he returns home....

I would give this book more than five stars if that were possible. I don't think I have ever read a book which manages to portray good people as convincingly and movingly as this one does. And if you react to it as I did, keep a hankie handy.

From the beginning of his long journey from Eastern Europe to London by bus, Lev is riddled with anxiety at leaving mother and daughter behind- his beloved wife has died- no work available in his home country, only hopelessness and hunger. Like others before him, Lev travels to London in search of employment, hoping to send money home and eventually be reunited with his family. His English only passable, Lev makes the acquaintance of Lydia, another traveler who leaves a note in his pocket: she will translate for him should Lev need her help in finding a job in this unfamiliar place. His funds rapidly diminishing, Lev sleeps out of doors, hidden from the prying eyes of passersby. With Lydia's assistance, he locates a room to rent and a position in the kitchen of a restaurant where the demanding and unpredictable chef waxes hot and cold.

Lev is more fortunate in his housing situation, renting from Christy Slane, whose wife has left with their small daughter. Because of Christy's all too frequent bouts with drinking and wild behavior, his wife's legal actions obstruct Lev's landlord's visitation with his child. At least at Christy's, Lev discovers a sympathetic friend, a man willing to share stories and disappointments. To alleviate the stresses of life in this new country, Lev comforts himself with reminiscences about his marriage before his wife's untimely death and the pleasure of time spent with his daughter, his overwhelming loneliness abated by calls on his new cell phone to his mother, Ina, and five-year-old, Maya, as well as his outrageous friend Rudi, an energetic complainer who offers family news and a stream of problems with the American "Tchevi" he has recently purchased to drive as a cab. Life is not all bleak, an impulsive romance with a coworker, Sophie, offering Lev a lifeline in an otherwise tedious existence.

An astute student of the human condition, the author straddles a thin line between Lev's immigrant experience, poignant memories and the hilarious diatribes that Rudi indulges in during their long-distance conversations. Torn between necessity and the comfort of his assignations with Sophie, Lev cannot shake his yearning for familiarity. His dilemma is artfully described, the grinding hours at the restaurant, the seduction of the past and Ina's endless pleas for her son to return home. Lev's displacement is at the heart of the novel, the complexity of feelings that confine happiness to moments and an ambivalence that all but cripples this struggling protagonist. A potpourri of warring emotions leaves Lev at odds with whether to stay or return home when he scents opportunity. Invisible, worn out by long hours, brief respites serve as temporary balm for his troubled heart. Tremain taps into the anguished isolation of the immigrant, exacerbated by a lack of communication, the result a painful journey through an unfamiliar place; restored by an entrepreneurial spirit, Lev transcends his limitations. Courage born of necessity is courage nonetheless. Luan Gaines/ 2008.