Book of the Month 10 QUESTIONS... ROSE TREMAIN

Reactions to the book in 2007 were mainly very positive. In telling the story of one man, I believe the novel helped reconcile anti-immigrant factions of the public to the human dilemma of the larger group, with whom it is harder to sympathise. When people ask what fiction is for, I remind them that this is one thing it can do really well: bring alive the joys and sufferings of a person we do not otherwise know (and towards whom we may have been feeling antagonistic) and arouse our sympathy for that individual. Today, with anti-immigrant sentiment running high once more, this book has to try to do its work all over again. It’s a real pity that the BBC has recently turned down the chance to bring this story to the small screen, but it’s great that I have been given the chance to revisit it in discussion with Peter Florence at the Winter Hay Festival. 

One adorable reader wrote to me to tell me that she loved Lev so much that this passion was ruining her marriage! And this is the greatest compliment a writer can ever receive – that an invented character feels so real to the reader that her emotional equilibrium is disturbed. For me, there was no prototype Lev. He just came into my mind: a handsome and loyal man, much loved by women, but heartbroken by the death of his wife and willing to gamble everything on a future in Britain, in order to rescue those he has left behind. He has many flaws, but he was always lovable to me and I think this is probably why he comes alive for the reader, because of my compassion for him. 

Except for one incident, in which Lev is mugged by some feral kids in North London, he is not subjected to violence. But if I was writing the story now, I think I would have to include more encounters with criminality. Today we hear of rough sleepers (and Lev is one of these for a while) being abused by passers-by and more hate crime inflicted on the immigrant population. London now troubles us all with a low hum of perpetual danger, which did not resonate quite so strongly in 2007. 

What inspires me is writing about people and places essentially distant from me, but which can be discovered and uncovered by finding a story to weave around them. Having always taken this route, and drawn very little on my own life in my fiction, it has never felt difficult for me to find the next idea. I just look at all that I do not know and choose something from that great, inexhaustible store. Then I follow the research and subject it to the x-ray vision of such imaginative power as remains to me. 

I needed to talk to ‘real’ Levs before I could set off on this journey, to get the truth of their situation. Mainly, I talked to vegetable pickers from Poland, working in East Anglia, and learned that their greatest worry was for their parents left behind in a post-Soviet world they were never fully able to understand - hence the importance of the character of Lev’s bad-tempered mother, Ina. I decided early that the event which drives Lev from his home was the loss of his wife, so it was then I had to understand how his emotional life, as well as his work life in England, was going to unfold. I think it took me a year to have most of the major decisions about the story in place, then another year to bring it all alive, then another few months to get to a final draft. 

I think that dedicated readers of fiction adore to be subjected to absolute immersion in a book, like an astronaut in a simulated space capsule. They really want to live it. Whether they can or not depends in great part on whether the story being told feels truthful to them. And it seems that for very many readers The Road Home really did convince them of its truth. 

I’ve just re-read Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is coming up to its 20th anniversary this year. Though completely different from The Road Home in time, subject and place, it is another of those novels which, in its evocation of its world, feels absolutely real and true. Readers are perfectly at home in this book. They can almost believe they’re part of a timeless painting. 

Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the opening volume of his Alexandrian Quartet. I loved it so much, I wanted to eat the book. Now, the royal purple of Durrell’s prose makes me want to hurl it all into the bin. 

 

9. What was the last book you read? 

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. A moving exploration of sisterly love and selfishness and a meditation on what and who keeps one from despair in the world. I like her unfussy, fast-paced style and the subtle humour which keeps a downbeat subject airborne to the very last page. 

I’m writing a novel set partly in Bath and partly in Borneo in the 1860s. I suppose, as a Brit writer, I may be trolled for ‘cultural appropriation’ because I include Malay characters. But I really do want to challenge the pervading idea that fiction writers should only explore the narrow path of their own quotidian lives. Autofiction appears to me as an interesting but essentially sterile blind alley. Supposing Dickens and George Eliot, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had been constrained in this way, to write only about their direct experiences? No Bleak House, then. No Middlemarch, no Crime and Punishment, and no Anna Karenina. And from Shakespeare - almost nothing at all.

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