The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Read Rose Tremain’s new novel and felt it was unjustly neglected by the ‘prize’ committees because if any book deserved to win an award it was this. Definitely her bravest and most mature book, it is a third person account of Lev, a middle-aged Eastern European immigrant who comes to the UK looking for work, having escaped the poverty of his own country, leaving his young daughter behind. Lev is one of those universal figures in fiction, a sort of comic, unassuming, chain-smoking blunderer who somehow manages to achieve real dignity. He winds up working in an upmarket restaurant and learning about the trade, graduating from washing up boy to being a chef of sorts. His love life is disastrous: he’s courted and then rejected by a trendy girl, and also by an unattractive mistress to a East European famous conductor. One of the best scenes in the book is when he goes to a concert with this woman and his mobile phone goes off.
Tremain highlights the incredible differences in wealth and poverty, between culture and illiteracy in Europe with a real comic touch. As ever, she excels in ‘set pieces’ describing dramatic scenes with a panache and precision that no other writer quite has. Highly recommended.

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