One of the ironies of any work in publishing and the book trade is that, because your work involves a lot of reading, you’re always at least a decade behind on what ‘everyone’ has read. That’s why, now the book-work is down to a minimum, I like doing my occasional series of ‘reviews of old books’. I hope you enjoy the reminders of favourites, and the waving of ones you may have missed. Here’s my latest.

A couple of months ago, I was working with an igcse student and, for the third time, found myself reading the text extract from the 2020 paper, Significant Cigarettes. The extract is the opening scene from Rose Tremain’s The Road Home, which won the women’s fiction prize in 2008. I knew about that, and knew why people liked it, but hadn’t got around to reading it.

Now, having close-read the first chapter three times, I damn well wanted to read chapter 2, so I got it out of the library. What brilliant timing. As you probably already know, it’s the story of Lev, a Russian guy who gets on a long-distance bus to come to London to try and earn enough money to get his family out of a mess after the saw-mill he’d been working at came to the end of trees.

 Now I don’t know if I’d have noticed this, or its significance, if I’d read the book back in 2008 but what’s extraordinary is that he has two survival strategies that get him through. One is that he’s not afraid of hard work: he actually carries out one of those deliver-millions-of-leaflets, earn tuppence ha’penny jobs, and goes the distance as washer-up in a restaurant kitchen and makes it onto the next rung (vegetable prep), where life is almost possible.

The other is that he makes friends with the people the diffident English just can’t see – the Arab guy running the kebab house, the bleary, eczema-strewn Irishman, the residents in a nursing home, Chinese fruit-pickers…

And by doing so, neatly demonstrates what it took my generation a long time to really grasp. We are, still, a horribly racist, nationalist country. It’s jangling at me again this morning, as the various heads of state across the world line up in the two teams on Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro and theft of Venezuela.

A-a-a-a-and here’s ours…

Sickening isn’t it. Not just that he’s come down on the side of ‘Trump is the grown up who’s taken action because Maduro (who after all is very foreign) just wasn’t up to the job.’ – not just that, but also that he’s saying that’s what ‘the UK’ that is, all of us, think.

The countries that aren’t shameful, post-colonial, racist throw-backs have lined up to say ‘hey, Trump, that’s illegal.’

The Road Home

We have to fix this and a good place to start is to read this book now (or re-read it, if you read it the first time around) and ask yourself whether you would have noticed the people Lev made friends with; and notice how all the English characters react to Lev, that scruffy, sometimes angry and distressed, and sometimes drunk, foreigner.

Pretty sure Starmer would have plumped for sending Lev to Rwanda, or whatever his current immigration ‘strategy’ is. It’s shameful. Let’s get rid of Starmer.

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