The Road Home, by Rose Tremain

The quote from that great novel of economic migration, The Grapes of Wrath, at the beginning of Rose Tremain's latest novel, can leave us in little doubt as to her intentions with this sympathetic, timely story of Eastern European, Lev, who travels to London looking for work. A widower with a young daughter and elderly mother to support, Lev wants only to improve his lot, with decent pay for a decent day's work.

But once Lev arrives in London, his aims begin to change. His travelling companion on the bus from Auror, Lydia, is looking for work as a translator. She has wealthy friends to put her up, and after a few nights sleeping rough, Lev contacts her for help. He has only found work distributing leaflets for a kebab shop and his funds are already dwindling. Lydia invites her for dinner with her friends and it is there that Lev experiences his epiphany. What he wants, is what has been impossible for him so far back home, and it is what these friends of Lydia's have found: a comfortable, middle-class existence.

Lev's middle-class ambitions - for a home of his own, nice wine on the table, a safe and leafy street to live in - are constantly thwarted by what he finds as he searches London streets for work. Overweight Britons, pasty-faced and unfriendly, can hardly be aligned with his oh-so "British" aspirations. It is the non-Britons who help him, like the kebab shop owner and Lev's landlord, Christy, an Irish plumber also been separated from his daughter, although for different reasons from Lev - his wife, Angela has left him for someone else and taken their daughter with her.

The isolation of the immigrant is something that Tremain never loses sight of: Christy and Lev bond through their mutual loneliness. When Lev secures a job in the sophisticated restaurant run by the arrogant, posturing Gregory Ashe, his vision of that middle-class existence grows but he cannot imagine ever crossing the vast wastes that separate the career possibilities for a native Londoner and an immigrant to the city.

The emptiness of what there is to aspire to in Britain is exposed by Tremain through Lev's experiences: he gets sexually involved with Sophie, a London-born worker at the restaurant who is a friend of designers and artists, all of them insular and ruthlessly ambitious, and this romance only results in his being fired by Ashe. But Tremain wants to give Lev something to take back with him, and he retains his ambition in spite of it all, only now he decides to open up his own restaurant back home in Auror.

Rather like Steinbeck, though, Tremain's ending is full of ambivalences. Complex writer that she is, she cannot let us simply enjoy Lev's future promise. Lev has learnt, through Gregory Ashe, how to be a good capitalist. But what's to stop him becoming another Gregory Ashe himself? Only an understanding of human frailty, seems to be the answer. Something those who pass Lev by on the streets of London are lacking in abundance.

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