I am nuts about Rose Tremain's fiction from A Sacred Country to Merivel. The Road Home has been on my book shelf since its publication date in 2007 and yet I hadn't opened it. Savidgereads is having a Tremain read-a-thon in honour of his grandmother and I thought I would finally read it. What a disappointment for me. The protagonist is Lev, who has come to England from an ex-communist country, looking for work to send money to his mother who is caring for his 5 year old daughter after the death of his wife a year or so prior. He also leaves his good friend Rudi, who supplied the only comic relief the book has to offer. I do not need to like my characters but I need humour if they are despicable or without introspection. Lev has honour but no shame. In his quest for work he goes from making 5 pounds a day delivering flyers to 17 pounds per hour as a chef. Despite help and support and even love along the way he continually bites the hand that feeds him. Lev admits to a temper but that is all. I lost any empathy for him when he assaults his girlfriend at an obnoxiously hip play, which she is enjoying but he finds morally offensive. His anger I understood but the violent assault (he chokes her) disturbed me. Later in the book she tries to forgive him after she rightfully breaks up with him and he then chokes her and rapes her. In relating this occurrence to Rudi he states "I guess it wasn't really far from rape". Well. And that is all that is said about that. The only person that stands by Lev is Lydia, whose friendship he rejects over and over only to phone her to ask for ten thousand pounds to open his own restaurant. What a jerk!
Anyway, I could have stood all this if there were satire or redemption but there is none. His reading of Hamlet throughout the novel (a gift from Lydia) as a device for Lev eventually gaining insight was flimsy and poorly executed, and indeed no insight was gained by this selfish, violent man.
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