In the course of her writing career, Rose Tremain has garnered a host of prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger, the Whitbread Novel Award, and several others. Earlier this year she won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for The Road Home, a story of a migrant worker from Eastern Europe.

Here Rose talks about The Road Home, how she writes and her research. To discover more about her books take a look at our reading guides for The Road Home, The Colour, Music & Silence and The Darkness of Wallis Simpson.

Your books generally seem to require great leaps of the imagination – in previous books you have taken the reader into the minds of a 13-year-old boy loose in Paris, a visitor to the 17th century Danish court, a young woman caught up in the New Zealand gold rush, and many more diverse people. The Road Home is no exception – you take us into the mind of an economic migrant from Eastern Europe trying to carve out a niche in an inhospitable London. Is this a challenge you deliberately set yourself? Why do you think you choose such diverse characters to inhabit?
 
The central character of my first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, was a 76 year-old man.  Readers found this surprising (I was 30 when I wrote the book), but in this gap between myself and my creation lay immense imaginative freedom, and it was this that gave me the courage to embark on the book.  Of course, I drew on observations of elderly men that I knew (my grandfather in particular), but the need to imagine Sadler’s feelings, memories and longings was what kept me interested in the story.  And since then, I’ve deliberately built my fictions around characters who are distant from me, in gender, place or time - or all of these.  The moment I get close to my own biography, I feel boredom (and even mild self-dislike) creeping up on me and so my writing loses pace. 

What research did you do for the novel?

The most important piece of research I did for The Road Home was to interview Polish field-workers in Suffolk.  I learned a lot from them – about what they hoped to achieve in England, how they viewed the people here, and how much they worried about their parents at home, left adrift – after 40 years in a Communist political system – in a world they might never fully understand.  I also read many books about life in post-1989 Eastern Europe and returned to my own notes made on earlier visits to East Berlin and Russia.  This research drove me to locate Lev’s backstory in an unnamed country, to create for myself the imaginative freedom mentioned above.   In the writing, in discovering Lev – his melancholy, his kindness, his seductive appearance, his naivety, his brave ambitions – lay all the joy of this book.   To use a GK-style culinary image, research was only one necessary ingredient in the assembling of a complex dish.

Most of Lev’s experiences in the UK are to do with food – from his very first job delivering takeaway leaflets, when he is paid in part with a greasy kebab that he can hardly swallow, through the kitchens of GK Ashe to the caravan in the asparagus fields. You describe food in the book in very detailed and vivid terms. Why did you choose to frame Lev’s journey though the UK in this way?

One of the things this novel is doing – in the age of the Celebrity Chef – islooking at what food represents to different groups of people at different moments in their lives:  food as survival (the Baryn lumber yard lunches, the beans and potatoes at Longmire Farm), food as comfort (Lydia’s hard boiled eggs, Christy’s ‘tea-and-toast’ life), food as ethnic expression (Jasmina’s mini-banquets, Panno’s unchanging Greek menu), food as a small business opportunity (Ahmed’s Kebabs), food as a distraction from solitude (Ferndale Heights) and food as a route to fame and fortune (GK’s high-endrestaurant). Lev experiences and interacts with all of these
and finds his own way  home through the idea that good food can provide one of the consolations in life that keeps people sane.  I think most readers would identify with this.  Meals are civilising punctuation points in any human day. Yet in Britain, even as restaurant food improves immeasurably throughout the country, many families have lost the habitof sharing a meal together and this means they’ve probably also lost the bonding habit of sharing details of their lives.  So you could argue that the food we eat and the way we eat it contributes to family stability or breakdown.

Read our reading guide for The Road Home for the complete interview.

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