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Summary
Summary
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys--he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet. Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country-but can he really go home again? Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in THE ROAD HOME, but her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.
Author Notes
Rose Tremain was born in London, England on August 2, 1943. She has written several novels including The Way I Found Her, Merivel: A Man of His Time, and The American Lover. Restoration was adapted into a movie in 1995 and a stage production in 2009. She has won numerous awards including the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger for Sacred Country, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for Music and Silence, and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 for The Road Home. She was made a CBE in 2007.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tremain (Restoration) turns in a low-key but emotionally potent look at the melancholia of migration for her 14th book. Olev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed former east bloc republic, is taking a bus to London, where he imagines every man resembles Alec Guinness and hard work will be rewarded by wealth. He has left behind a sad young daughter, a stubborn mother and the newly shuttered sawmill where he had worked for years. His landing is harsh: the British are unpleasant, immigrants are unwelcome, and he's often overwhelmed by homesickness. But Lev personifies Tremain's remarkable ability to craft characters whose essential goodness shines through tough, drab circumstances. Among them are Lydia, the fellow expatriate; Christy, Lev's alcoholic Irish landlord who misses his own daughter; and even the cruelly demanding Gregory, chef-proprietor of the posh restaurant where Lev first finds work. A contrived but still satisfying ending marks this adroit emigre's look at London. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After the death of his wife, Lev leaves his unnamed Eastern European country for London to try and make enough money to support his mother and daughter. His only contact with home becomes a series of cell-phone calls with his hilarious and irrepressible best friend and with his depressed mother. Through his journey, Lev becomes a sort of anti-Candide, starting off depressed and pessimistic and then experiencing a series of happy accidents and good relationships that give him hope and allow him to rebuild his life and sense of self. Lev manages to be both a symbol of migrant workers and a fully developed character in his own right. Not all of the characters in the book are so lucky, especially Sophie, a young coworker-love interest, who morphs from charitable ingénue to fame-obsessed femme fatale with little explanation. Overall, this is an engaging, enjoyable, and informative read.--Block, Marta Segal Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MANY people long to write novels and some manage to do so, often at terrible personal cost. Balzac fueled his prodigious productivity by drinking pot after pot of coffee, night after night, and may have died of caffeine poisoning. Flaubert, according to his biographer Francis Steegmuller, was tormented by the ordeal of "Madame Bovary" - a friend had suggested the idea, then badgered him into writing the book. "I feel as dreary as a corpse," Flaubert confessed midproject. "My accursed Bovary torments and confounds me." But reading any novel by Rose Tremain, one suspects that what is torture for so many writers comes naturally to her. She has written about a dozen novels, set in different eras and places: Restoration England, present-day Paris, Denmark in the late Renaissance, New Zealand during the mid-19th-century gold rush, a Suffolk farm community in the 1950s. Each book has an entirely distinct voice, tone and subject, but all have an equal vigor, fluency and authenticity of characterization. Tremain seems to enter every one of her novels as if she were playing a game - let's call it "Author" whose rules she confidently reinvents with each new hand. Her latest novel, "The Road Home," is concerned with the struggles of a widowed, middle-aged immigrant, Lev, who leaves his Russian village when the sawmill closes. ("They ran out of trees," he explains, a poignant reduction of an insoluble problem.) Soon after, Lev travels to London to find work so he can send money home to his mother, his 5-year-old daughter and his best friend. Journeys like Lev's are very much a part of Britain's present reality, with discussion of the Eastern European invasion appearing all over. But Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev not a statistic or a caricature or the standard-bearer of a trend but simply a man - fully embodied, his ignoble and noble acts presented without exaggeration, without excessive praise or condemnation. His difficulties, though specific, are not exceptional. As Lev fearfully, tentatively navigates this strange new city, still mourning his wife, who died of leukemia at 36, he gets to know other Londoners. Ahmed, a Muslim kebab-shop owner struggling to keep his business afloat in the post-9/11 world, gives him his first job, distributing leaflets. ("What's up?" Ahmed asks quietly when he hears Lev weeping in the men's room. "Nothing," Lev says. To which Ahmed responds, "When men cry, it is never for nothing.") Lev also meets Christy, a divorced Irish plumber who resents his upwardly mobile ex-wife and pines for his daughter; and Sophie, a young chef with a lizard tattoo who flirts with the restaurant's celebrity guests but fusses over elderly people on Sundays at a retirement home called Ferndale Heights. Ruby, one of the Ferndale residents, is a rich old woman whose grown children neglect her. When Lev accompanies Sophie on her visits, Ruby confides her "guilt at how useless my life has been" and shares memories of her childhood in India, particularly a school pageant for the British viceroy, when she held half of the letter "O" in a welcome sign. "I sometimes think," she confides, "That's all your life has amounted to, Ruby Constad, being half of something." Lev meets other economic migrants: a Russian woman on her own path to self-reinvention, who looks "determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam"; a teenage Russian kitchen worker; and two Chinese field laborers, Jimmy and Sonny, who laugh as they harvest asparagus, offering living proof that you can create your own happiness, even in far from happy circumstances. Tremain understands there's heroism in the everyday act of survival, and she gradually brings Lev to the point where he can see this for himself. Back in Auror, his village in Russia, Lev had left the heroics to his best friend, Rudi, a cocky dreamer whose battered sky-blue Chevrolet ("my girl," "my baby," but most often "the Tchevi") has been converted into a taxi, its front door secured with the hinges from a baby's pram, its windows de-iced with vodka. In London, Lev captivates his new friends with anecdotes about Rudi, not ready to take on the responsibility of generating his own story. After sleeping under trees and behind bushes to conserve his meager store of £20 notes, Lev moves into an apartment in a "street of choky little houses, called Belisha Road," with the lonely Irishman, Christy. He takes a bunk bed in the room Christy's young daughter had previously occupied: "He felt lucky to have found Christy Slane, to have been given a child's room. He wasn't too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase printed with giraffes." And he finds solace in the emotional bond he and his roommate share. "They both longed," Tremain writes, "to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost." After Lev finds a menial job in the chic restaurant where Sophie works, he slowly moves up the food chain to vegetable preparer, taking baby steps toward a career as a chef. "I should feel grateful that the sawmill closed," he tells himself. Otherwise he might have ended up like his father, "enslaved to a lumberyard until I died, and to the same lunch each day, and to the snow falling and drifting, year on year, falling and drifting in the same remote and backward places." But while Lev may have dodged a backward existence by coming to London, he's not exactly going forward, either. It takes a call from Rudi, informing him that his past is under siege - the village of Auror is about to be drowned by the construction of a dam - to shove Lev out of neutral. He can no longer take refuge in his past, which will soon be underwater. How can Rudi drive the fabled Tchevi once Auror is submerged? How will Lev's mother and daughter manage to survive, with no address where he can send his weekly installments of foreign aid? The shock of this news jump-starts Lev, pushing him to action. Can he use his newfound cooking skills and connections to build a restaurant back in Russia? If he does, will anyone come? A less disciplined and agile author might have been tempted to ease Lev's transition from daydreamer to doer. Or she might have jollied Lev into a toque at London's River Café and set Rudi up as a chauffeur on Belisha Road. But Rose Tremain is in the business of inventing not so much fantasies as alternate realities. In "The Road Home," she lets Lev in on her secret: "Don't think about Auror down there in the darkness. Don't think about the past." The present is also a work of imagination. Journeys like those of Tremain's grieving hero are much a part of Britain's present reality. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
It became a truism some time in the 1990s that much of what was most vibrant and exciting in British literature was being written by Britons who were either immigrants themselves, or the children of immigrants. From VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie to Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali, these were writers giving a vivid, altered Britain back to British readers, describing a chaotic, multicultural, modern London, rather than the Blitz-depleted city of postwar English novelists. It is an act of distinctive literary boldness on Rose Tremain's part to add her own (native, English) contribution to immigrant literature about London. Tremain has always taken the risk of following her imagination wherever it takes her, whether into the loneliness of the transgendered, the corridors of the past, the complications of other countries (Denmark, New Zealand, France); or some combination of the above. Her new novel, The Road Home , is set in contemporary London, but it is the story of Lev, a widower in his 40s who is just moving to England, seeing the place with the hope and bewilderment of the newly arrived. Tremain makes the significant choice not to identify Lev's country of origin (perhaps he comes from the same nameless Eastern bloc country featured in Julian Barnes's 1992 novel, The Porcupine ). It seems closest to Poland or Slovakia - some place that has recently joined the EU and is "a world slipping and sliding on a precipice between the dark rockface of Communism and the seductive, light-filled void of the liberal market." Tremain's decision frees her to sketch the village Auror that Lev has left behind with invented details of market life and the failing timber mill; perhaps more to the point, it allows her to avoid any discussion of actual historical events. For politics is not Tremain's primary concern here. The novel's subject is, rather, displacement: what it feels like not to belong. In this sense, it is a classic work by the gifted Tremain, whose natural timbre is a wry melancholy, and who is, as she has said, primarily interested in the people outside the main event. She has often written of travellers, of the exiled and the banished, and so it seems apt that she should turn her attention to the waves of eastern Europeans seeking new fortunes in England. Early on, confronted with an unfriendly policeman near Victoria, Lev remembers what he was told before he left home: "Remember, you are legal, economic migrants, not 'asylum-seekers' as the British call those who have been dispossessed . . . You have the right to work in England. You must not let yourself be harassed." And so, after a few rocky days of sleeping rough and earning a meagre wage leafleting for Ahmed's Kebabs, Lev slowly finds his way, guided as he often is by his good-hearted compatriot Lydia, his seatmate on the long trans-Europe bus-crossing with which the novel opens. Lydia has secured a post in London as a translator for the famous conductor from their country, Maestro Greszler, and with her help Lev finds a job as a dishwasher in a chic, upmarket restaurant, as well as a room lodging with divorced Irishman Christy Slane. Much of what makes Lev's life, and the novel that contains it, so rich are these and other friendships. Over vodka (his nation's conversational aide) or tea, or cans of Guinness, Lev and Christy talk of the daughters they both miss - Lev's five-year-old, Maya, is living with his mother back in Auror, Christy's daughter is in the hands of his hostile ex-wife - and of work, of love, of art. And Lev pours out stories about his best friend Rudi, a character as vivid as any in the book, who scratches out a living back at home driving his beloved Chevrolet - known as the Tchevi - as a taxicab. Feisty, blustery Rudi is a lovely counterpart throughout to the quieter, more introverted Lev; but it will be Lev who returns to Rudi in the end, with a plan for the future. The arc of the novel is essentially one of self-improvement; although Lev has various ventures in employment, there is no plot, per se. We are, rather, accompanying Lev on his journey, relishing his many encounters - with a sexy, spiky co-worker at the restaurant who becomes his girlfriend; with the imperious chef from whom Lev picks up tips on the restaurant trade; with an elderly Englishwoman at a home; with a recently arrived young countryman named Vitas who misses, more than anything else, his dog. In Suffolk, part of a crew picking asparagus, Lev meets a farmer who takes a liking to him, and two benevolent gay Chinese migrant workers. Tremain is at her luminous best in these odd moments of companionability; she has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection. That these relations lead Lev gradually to the road home gives the story a gentle, pleasing form, if not any real dramatic denouement. As in many novels about immigrants, two of the significant issues throughout are money and food. Lev soon makes the discovery common to any London visitor: that a person seems to haemorrhage money immediately on entering the city, and since he is sending pounds 20 home weekly for his mother and Maya, he must watch himself carefully. Tremain clearly enjoys observing wealthy Londoners, their vapidity, their selfishness, through Lev's eyes - and also more cheerfully enjoys describing the busy workings of a kitchen in a high-end restaurant. She recounts in succulent detail several of the meals Lev produces as he begins to hone his own culinary skills. Strangely, it is not until near the end that we are given the dishes particular to Lev's country (rabbit with juniper berries, seaweed ravioli). By then the novel is working up to its poignant conclusion: that home as you once knew it may be transformed beyond recognition, but there will always be food and friendship for consolation. Sylvia Brownrigg's novel The Delivery Room is published by Picador. To order The Road Home for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/ bookshop Caption: article-Fiction5.1 [Rose Tremain] makes the significant choice not to identify Lev's country of origin (perhaps he comes from the same nameless Eastern bloc country featured in Julian Barnes's 1992 novel, The Porcupine ). It seems closest to Poland or Slovakia - some place that has recently joined the EU and is "a world slipping and sliding on a precipice between the dark rockface of Communism and the seductive, light-filled void of the liberal market." Tremain's decision frees her to sketch the village Auror that [Lev] has left behind with invented details of market life and the failing timber mill; perhaps more to the point, it allows her to avoid any discussion of actual historical events. For politics is not Tremain's primary concern here. The novel's subject is, rather, displacement: what it feels like not to belong. Much of what makes Lev's life, and the novel that contains it, so rich are these and other friendships. Over vodka (his nation's conversational aide) or tea, or cans of Guinness, Lev and [Christy Slane] talk of the daughters they both miss - Lev's five-year-old, Maya, is living with his mother back in Auror, Christy's daughter is in the hands of his hostile ex-wife - and of work, of love, of art. And Lev pours out stories about his best friend Rudi, a character as vivid as any in the book, who scratches out a living back at home driving his beloved Chevrolet - known as the Tchevi - as a taxicab. Feisty, blustery Rudi is a lovely counterpart throughout to the quieter, more introverted Lev; but it will be Lev who returns to Rudi in the end, with a plan for the future. - Sylvia Brownrigg.
Kirkus Review
A displaced European's Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award-winning British author (The Colour, 2003, etc.). The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn't Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who'll re-enter Lev's new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. While sticking close to Lev's roiling thought processes, Tremain simultaneously constructs a subtly detailed mosaic of personal and cultural distinctions and conflicts--notably in Lev's cautious approach to reclaiming a sex life (perhaps even a love life?) and in generously developed conversations between Lev and his fulsome Irish landlord, bibulous plumber and compulsive worrywart Christy Slane. The novel's texture is further enriched by lengthy flashbacks spun from Lev's wistful memories, which acquaint us more fully with his warmhearted late wife Marina and his best friend Rudi, a resourceful hustler whose busy head is filled with visions of all things American, and foolproof scams by which such riches may be acquired. Rudi is an ingenious comic counterpart to Candide's annoyingly optimistic mentor Pangloss, and the novel dances into vigorous life whenever he takes hold of it. Still, Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Winner of the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, this latest book by Tremain (The Colour) is the story of widower Lev, an economic migrant who travels from the Eastern Bloc to London to find work to support his child back home. Actress/narrator Juliet Stevenson's (To the Lighthouse) distinct rendering of each character gives this recording the feel of a full-cast production. Listeners who enjoy Anita Brookner and literary fiction will be moved by this realistic portrait. Highly recommended. [Audio clip available through www.-naxosaudiobooks.com; the Little, Brown hc was recommended as "a worthy addition to the growing body of work centered on the loneliness and frustration of the immigrant experience," LJ 5/1/08.-Ed.]-Carly Wiggins, Allen Cty. P.L., Fort Wayne, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
