The Road Home-Rose Tremain commentary

The Road Home

Structure

This novel follows the traditional Hero’s journey with the departure and the famous return. In the middle of this, the classic events are blurry, however the meeting of the temptress is well kept. Sophie’s arrival is emphasised which contrasts with Lydia. This structure creates an appealing novel as it is classical, therefore the reader knows what to expect. Nevertheless, the classic exposition-climax- and denouement is not respected as the novel has many smaller climaxes, for example in every chapter there is new interest point/climax: this could create this idea that the world is always moving and things are changing, like immigrants.

The pace is generally unbalanced in this novel. This unbalance creates an artificial aspect to the novel, it seems as if it is unfinished.

On a detailed level, pace is created through the variety of sentence length. Rose Tremain has the tendency to mix the sentence lengths up a lot, creating an interesting and dynamic novel.

Flashbacks and flashforwards play a very important role in this novel. Flashbacks are introduced in an artificial way giving them less credibility. Also, we see that they become rare towards the end, this shows that there has been a change is the characters. Most of the flashbacks are sad moments, such as the numerous ones about Marina.

In total, there are 24 chapters. They are all about the same lengths, however they become longer towards the middle of the book, emphasising the main climaxes. They follow an irregular pattern, for example some end in a climax, whilst others don’t. There is no coherence between the chapter titles. This could show the fact that the immigrants are lost. Moreover, the chapter titles do have a link with the content of the chapters.

Journey and return are both at the center of this novel, literally and figuratively. This motif comes back which shows it is at the center, hence the title.

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