'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 365 pages; 2008.

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. A half-price promotion at Waterstone's was the final push I needed, and so, that was how I found myself last weekend opening this book and falling in love with it.

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."

Comments

[Tony]

I will continue to keep "The Road Home" near the top of my "To Read" list, because I've read several Rose Tremain novels, and think she is a strong enough writer to warrant my reading her novels, even though a critic or two may not be completely bowled over. Don't get me wrong, I highly respect your opinions on reading matters; it's just that some few writers have reached the level where I need to find out for myself, and Rose Tremain is one of them.

[kimbofo]

Fair enough, Tony. Perhaps this review sounds overly harsh. I actually very much enjoyed the book -- I gave it four stars after all -- but there were some aspects in the latter half that let the overall story down. On reflection, I think the major problem is that it all seems so contrived. I will definitely be interested in hearing what you think of the book when you have read it.

[C.B. James]

I've tagged you.

http://readywhenyouarecb.blogspot.com/2008/07/over-rated-classics-meme.html

If you don't like tags, please skip it.

[kimbofo]

CB, thanks for tagging me, but I generally don't do memes.

[Carlton]

Just finished this today and I too felt that it was a little too rose tinted at the end and that Tremain had lost interest. Nevertheless I really enjoyed the quality of the writing and the descriptions of the restaurant work were fascinating.
For a different view, try Two Caravans which is lighter and has more characters and so can afford to be more realistic, despite the comedy.

[kimbofo]

Carlton, thanks for sharing your views. Yes, I neglected to mention the food/restaurant element to this novel. It made me hungry reading it!

I must remember to read Two Caravans, as I did quite like her debut (which is reviewed on this blog somewhere)! The second one didn't seem to generate so much publicity.

[Lotus]

I picked up this book sometime last year but never really had the urge to take if off the shelf to read it until it received all that buzz with the Orange Prize. Now that you've endorsed it as well, I will have to give it a whirl.

[Tom C]

Oh dear, I started it but never finished it. I kind of lost interest part way through. I think the Maeve Binchy thing hits it on the head. An excellent story however, no doubt. My wife is now reading it for her book group and I'll be interested to see if they enjoy it

[kimbofo]

Lotus, hello stranger! Yes, time to extract this from your shelf for a good old read. I'd be interested in finding out what you think of it. Initially I thought this book was going to be a five-star review, but the second half made me knock a star off!

Tom C, it'd probably make a good book group read, actually, because there's certainly some interesting issues raised in the book. But I'm not surprised you lost interest part-way through. Mine started to decline after I realised the direction in which it was headed.

[Tom C]

It was all a bit Maeve Binchyish for me and I gave up - shame as I'm a great admirer of Tremain's work

[Mad Asthmatic]

Having read your review i decided to read this. I have never read any of Rose Tremain's books before. I have to say I was bowled over with the first half and loved it, however I started to lose interest a little in the second half as suddenly Lev was able to save what seemed a huge amount of money in a short period of time, the fairy tale undertones seemed to be at odds with the start of the book, but maybe that is what makes it such an interesting read. I am definitely going to get some more books by Tremain out of the library, any recommendations?

MA

[kimbofo]

MA, try Music & Silence which I read about 8 or 9 years ago. It was brilliant. It's historical fiction, set in the 17th century. The story revolves around King Christian IV of Denmark