The Road Home by Rose Tremain

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.

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland

Just as all songs seem to be about love, I find that fiction seems to be often about loneliness or that very human need to connect.  Amy Rowland's first novel The Transcriptionist does this elegantly.  Her prose is soft and gentle and I melted into this intelligent novel.  Lena works alone in a small office transcribing by dictaphone stories for a large New York paper.  She lives alone in a ywca by Gramercy Park.  What brings Lena out of her solitude is a brief connection with a blind woman on a bus whose suicide (by entering a lion's den at the zoo) she transcribes.   Amy leaves her solitude to go on search of this stranger's life in order to give it meaning.   The book has several plot points which, despite the short length of the novel, unfold slowly and gently.  Amy Rowland has a deliberate way of writing, each word necessary, which I loved.

This is the Water by Yannick Murphy

This is the forth novel I've read by the crazily versatile Yannick Murphy and was a bit hesitant as it is written in the second person present tense for a lot of it, but Murphy is so original I was drawn in despite myself.  This "you" is Annie, an insecure mother of 2 adolescents on a swim team that is being beset by a serial killer.  So far, so run of the mill mystery, you think - but not so.  Murphy has a gift for character as well as plot, unlike so many procedural mysteries, and this is what kept me invested.  It's like Murphy is turning the standard mystery on its head.  The killer and his psychopathic motives are revealed early.  So what we care about are the vulnerable, flawed parents dealing with consequences from their own fucked up behaviour, often satirically, which I always love.