Tag-Archive for ◊ Road ◊

Author:
• Saturday, December 11th, 2010

Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson in London in 1943. She attended Frances Holland School from 1949 to 1954, then Crofton Grange School from 1954 to 1961. Afterwards she studied at The Sorbonne in Paris for one year, where she took a diploma in the “Cours de Civilisation française”.

She graduated from the University of East Anglia with a B.A. (honours) Degree in English in 1967 and taught Creative writing from 1988 to 1995 in the University of East Anglia.

Rose Tremain has won several awards for her books. She has written several novels, short-story collections and a number of radio and television plays. She was chosen as one of the twenty “Best Young British Novelists” in a promotion by the literary magazine Granta published in 1983. She was a judge for The Booker Prize for Fiction in 1988 and in 2000. She reviews and broadcasts on a regular basis for the press and radio.

The Road Home was short-listed for the 2007 Costa Novel Award and won the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Before writing The Road Home, Rose Tremain undertook extensive reading and researching about post 1989 Eastern European society. She also benefited from interviewing Polish field-workers in Suffolk.

Rose Tremain has been divorced twice and now lives with her companion, Richard Holmes, the biographer, between Norfolk and London. She has one daughter from her first marriage in 1972 who became an actress.

Rose Tremain was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2007.

The setting of The Road Home is contemporary London. The main character is a forty-two-year-old East European called Lev, from an unnamed ex Eastern bloc republic. He is an unemployed, lumberyard worker after his sawmill closed due to lack of wood and a bereaved widower since his young wife Marina died of leukaemia. In desperation he decides to travel for many hours by bus from his rural village, Auror, to reach London in order to find a job which will provide a humble living for his impoverished old mother and his five-year-old daughter who remains back home.

In The Road Home, the author tackles a present reality issue, a good insight into the problem of the Eastern European labourers who migrate to the Western world and the harsh repelling reality they face. They feel unwelcome by the English and have to withstand a great deal of hardship in order to survive and supply means of subsistence to their families.

The author succeeds in humanising, with compassionate understanding, the problem concerning the invasion of Eastern European workers, by portraying a friendly and sincere Lev, who like any human being has his good qualities, his weaknesses and his misdeeds. He is not just a part of an unjust and cold statistic of the unpopular foreign invader-workers we read about. He is described in a sympathetic, likeable way.

He is handsome, he is kind, sincere and feels for others. Lev is homesick; he is certain that he doesn’t belong to this Western society he lives in, but he has to endure his affliction courageously in order to reach the target he has set himself.

The story is engaging, poignant at times, but thanks to Christy, Lev’s drunken Irish, light-hearted landlord and Rudi, Lev’s best friend and compatriot, who stayed back home, the reader can enjoy some comic relief.

An easy to read, emotionally rich and entertaining novel while at the same time thought provoking. Despite the nostalgia and melancholy of some chapters, it’s an optimistic story full of hope.

Through Lev’s eyes, we see the materialistic world that he can’t fully understand and we see all the decadence of the West, depicted in English society : The portrayal of old people left unvisited by their children in old people’s homes, the well-to-do snobs who cheer with approval a play that makes a banality out of incestuous-paedophilia simulation, or the amount of waste in a capitalist country.

Not really an attractive sight. Rose Tremain says in one of her interviews : “It’s the culture we swim in… I do think for an outsider’s eye it does look extremely vulgar and shallow…More now than it ever has.”

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Author:
• Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Martin Davies grew up in North West England. He travelled a great deal from the Middle East to India. Today he is a BBC television senior producer and editor and lives in South West London.

His bibliography :
Mrs Hudson and the Spirits Curse published in 2004.
Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose published in 2005.
The Conjuror’s Bird published in 2005.
The Unicorn Road published in 2009.

The Conjuror’s Bird is based on historical facts with genuine people from the 18th century like the well-known explorer, botanist and patron of natural sciences, the wealthy Lincolnshire landowner, Baronet Sir Joseph Banks, who was part of Captain James Cook’s first grand voyage around the world on the “Endeavour”, from 1768 to 1771. He was also the unofficial scientific adviser to king George III.

Other known people of the time are Banks’s best friend, Dr. Daniel Carlsson Solander, the Swedish botanist and natural scientist, his Danish friend, Johann Christian Fabricius, professor of natural history and world famous entomologist, and his German friend, the naturalist, ethnologist and travel writer, Johann Georg Forster.

Upon his return to England from Captain Cook’s second expedition in 1774 in the South Seas, Forster offers Banks the well-preserved single specimen of the extinct Ulieta bird.

The novel focuses on the Ulieta bird which became extinct in the 18th century. The extinction of species remains a controversial subject in our 21st century, with its many on-going debates about how humans are destroying the world’s flora and fauna and therefore creating a dangerous unbalance in the ecosystem. A big and serious problem that existed once upon a time and still exists today with apparantly no way of stopping it, unfortunately.

The Conjuror’s Bird intertwines history, romance and thrilling detective pursuit. It’s a biographical fiction mystery novel with literary merit and an engaging, suspenseful story, well-written with intense emotions.

In his novel, the author runs in parallel, by alternating chapters and by using a different typeface, an interlinked story of three centuries: the 18th, the 20th and the 21st, where the past meets the present. The story of the taxidermist, John Fitzgerald, who goes on a detective mission, hunting for the only specimen left of the Ulieta bird, which once belonged to Joseph Banks but disappeared from his collection without any explanation and was never seen again.

If it wasn’t for a coloured drawing done by Forster’s son, Georg, which can be seen in The Natural History Museum in London, no one would have known of its existence. The second story being the love tale of Joseph Banks with the mysterious Miss B—n, the main link being the elusive Ulieta bird and the unknown Miss B. with the striking green eyes, who seems to be the key to finding the long disappeared stuffed bird.

The third story being the discovery of the Congo peacock by James Chapin, the American naturalist,twenty three years after coming across a single peacock feather earlier in the 20th century.

Another link in the novel is the two unfulfilled love stories which stand two centuries apart. The strong and impossible passion that Joseph Banks once shared with Miss B. (Mary Burnett?) who was a woman well ahead of her time in Georgian society, and the infatuation that John Fitzgerald and the ambitiously independent Gabriella used to have for each other. Both loves seem to have ended due to a child, a daughter.

The characters are well depicted, the novel competently structured and a successful amount of research attained. A very pleasant read.