THE ROAD HOME

By Rose Tremain

It takes an outstanding novelist to make an imaginary character take on a physical and emotional reality. In The Road Home, Rose Tremain skillfully captures the empathy of the reader so that, by the end of the first page, the experiences of Lev, an Eastern European who travels to London to seek work, become compulsive reading.

The story begins with Lev’s long bus journey from his home town. Desolate because of the death of his wife, and facing a bleak future when the sawmill where he is employed closes down, he travels to London to find work. He leaves behind his mother, who makes jewellery from tin so that she can support the family, and his beloved little daughter; he also leaves his close friend, Rudi, a strong and outrageous personality whose life revolves around his old and battered Chevrolet taxi. Britain, Lev quickly discovers, is very different from the wealthy West around which Rudi’s fantasies revolve.

Alone and friendless in London, and thanks to Rudi’s “miscalculating the money question so disastrously”, Lev finds himself homeless, hungry and without employment. Eventually, he is given the task of delivering leaflets for Ahmed’s Kebabs but at the end of the first day he realises that he can’t possibly survive on the pittance he is paid. He is forced to sleep rough, and only when he contacts the woman who was his travelling companion on the bus to London, is he able to find shelter and, at last, a job in a trendy restaurant, washing up. He finds lodgings, and befriends the landlord, Christy. In the restaurant kitchen, Lev watches the chefs preparing food, and quietly learns. After a while, his prospects improve when he is promoted to vegetable preparation and by coincidence, the boy who takes over the washing up is a compatriot, from the same area as Lev. It is from this boy that Lev finds out about a proposed dam which, if it goes ahead, will flood his village.

Life in London is not easy, but although Lev encounters hostility, he also finds love when he begins a relationship with Sophie. He makes friends, too, many of them migrants, like himself, from other countries. When he is sacked from the restaurant, he finds employment with an asparagus farmer. By now, Lev has a goal: he is going to earn enough money, as quickly as he can, so that he can return to his own country and realise his dream.

Every year, migrant Eastern Europeans come to our village, Guajar Alto, seeking work, and like Lev, they leave behind a bleak existence. A recent newspaper report featured a group of unemployed Lithuanians who were living rough in Granada province and supplementing their meagre diet by killing and eating the village cats. Despite the hardships they were forced to endure, they claimed that their lives were better here than in Lithuania.

Rose Tremain portrays with great sensitivity the sad plight of people like Lev, and the prejudices they face when they try to improve their lives by emigrating to wealthy countries. The Road Home is a superbly written, exceptionally good novel.