Trying to Cross Frontiers of Fortress Europe: Rose Tremain’s Novel The Road Home (2007)

Abstract

The Road Home, the novel about immigration by Rose Tremain which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007, tells the story of a 43-year-old widower Lev, an Eastern European who goes to Britain in search of work. The country of his origin, though purposefully unspecified, lies somewhere in the former Eastern bloc and thus Lev represents a ‘generic Eastern European’, combining a set of characteristics which may be seen as symbolizing ‘Fortress Europe’s Other’. Tremain’s novel does not try to challenge stereotypes and in its presentation of Eastern Europeanness exemplifies a well known truth that crossing intellectual and mental frontiers may prove much more difficult than crossing physical borders. The paper seeks to contribute to the critical debate around the issue of collective identity and its constructions.