Changes

|title=The Road Home

|sort=Road Home

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=320

|publisher=Vintage

|date=June 2008

|isbn=978-0099478461

}}

Lev is mourning for his wife Marina, dead of leukaemia at the age of 36. After losing his job in the Baryn sawmill, which closed after all the trees had been used up, he sinks into depression while his elderly mother supports him and his 5 year old daughter Maya making tin jewellery. The money is not enough though and Lev decides to go to Britain, to the lucky land of lucky people who didn't experience the damaging effects of too much history happening in their lifetime. ''The Road Home'' is a chronicle of Lev's stay in the UK, starting with his 50 hour journey on the coach.

We never learn which specific country he comes from (although it's a New-EU country, and almost certainly one that used to be a part of the Soviet Union) and this omission, at first disconcerting, gives his story a convincingly general quality: Lev becomes an New-EU everyman, standing for all the new migrants, the Latvians and Estonians, Poles and Slovaks, Czechs and Lithuanians that arrive at Victoria, Stanstead and Dover with more or less English, more or less money, more or less contacts, and a hope: for a job, a room, a job, a phone, a job, a chance.

The narrative is perfectly realised in the third-person free indirect style and we see everything from Lev's point of view only, unvaryingly convincing in the rendition of perceptions, emotions and moods. The language is classically transparent and reflects the internal states it relates to and thus we see other people and places through the lens of Lev's tiredness and depression, excitement and elation, anger and guilt. The writing is subtle, clean and luminous and the whole text doesn't have a single false sentence, a single false tone. Actually, there is one: an implicit mention of a Tube journey on Christmas day, when the Underground (and most public transport) shuts altogether, but this slight factual inaccuracy can easily be forgiven and immediately forgotten.

[[Brick Lane]] tells a rather different tale of immigration experience but shares the motif of personal growth, while [[A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian]] takes a comedy approach to a family story of Eastern Europeans who escaped to Britain from the cruel hand of history.

{{commenthead}}

|name=Helena Hawke

|verb=said

Helena

}}