FICTION

We all find it easier to describe people who annoy or hurt us, but we are less articulate when it comes to evoking the good people we know.

Novelists have the same problem: The virtuous are never as engaging as the flawed and wicked -- think Scarlett O'Hara and Mr. Wickham. But British writer Rose Tremain, in her new novel, "The Road Home," affectingly celebrates a man who is both good and engaging.

Her protagonist, Lev, is an immigrant from an impoverished former communist country who travels to England to find work. While Tremain's England is more the gritty home of immigrants than of landed gentry, the settings also include a fashionable restaurant, a trendy art show and a symphony concert.

And though the novel is about a man haunted by memories and a homeland "that is wild and beautiful," Tremain is also describing that painful immigrant condition of being foreign in an often indifferent and hostile culture.

Lev, an engineer who has been laid off from a sawmill because there are no trees left to cut, supports his mother and small daughter. His wife, Marina, recently died from cancer -- the family blames the polluted environment -- and, like other East Europeans, he hopes to make enough money in England to return home.

Like an immigrant Job, Lev endures numerous disasters and disappointments before he finds tranquillity and fulfillment. He is beaten up by young thugs who steal his money; he is fired when his affair with a co-worker in a fancy restaurant, where he is a dishwasher, is discovered; the woman he loves leaves him for a trendy artist; he works as a migrant laborer for low wages picking asparagus; back home, a dam will soon drown his village; and both his mother and loyal friend, Rudi, need money; so once back in London, he works two jobs.

Tremain has a Dickensian talent for creating distinctive characters -- Lev's kind, divorced Irish landlord, Christy; demanding celebrity chef G.K. Ashe; and the idiosyncratic inmates of a nursing home where Lev cooks lunch -- who enrich an already beguiling story.

The good can engage, as Tremain proves in this accomplished story of a good man who eventually finds a place, and work -- cooking -- that makes him joyful. And we are cheering him on as he survives a dark past to reach a sunnier present.
Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.