Wrong Turn
Rose Tremain, The Road Home, 2007
What a big disappointment. I loved Rose Tremain's Music & Silence as well as her recent short story, "The Jester of Astapovo", so I was looking forward to reading this award-winning novel. What I found instead was a cliché-ridden rags-to-riches tale of an immigrant, Lev, from an indeterminate Eastern European country who decides to try his luck in London because he can't find work back home and has a family to support. The first few chapters promise a look at London's world of struggling immigrants, but soon Lev is on his feet at the expanse of the story's plausibility and the narrative flounders.
Tremain pulls no stops with the generalisations when she paints some of the English as consumerist pigs and the theatre world, especially, as a cesspit of shallow pretentious idiots. Tremain gets it so wrong with most of her characters that I'm amazed she got an award for this and that people even like the book! There are glimmers in some passages of the Tremain I like, as well as a compelling character (mostly) in Lev, but it all keeps disappearing under the plodding, insipid narrative. Here's to hoping for a return to form in her next work.