When home has no hope

WE LIVE in a world of exiles and displaced people; they pass among us every day, much remarked upon but not quite truly seen. Displaced by war, political upheaval, genocide, poverty and environmental disaster, modern exiles occupy a peculiar spot in the collective consciousness, and their burden can be strange. If you have been forced to leave New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina and have set up a life elsewhere, how might you explain the alienation you feel in Houston, or Atlanta, or Portland, Ore., cities in your own country? If you're a Turk working in Germany or Holland and sending money home to your family, how might you articulate the continual sense of being neither here nor there, and yet in both places at once?

Indeed, the state of modern exile is frequently characterized not by burnt earth and the impossibility of going home, but by a perpetual border crossing, an uneasy doubleness. You can go back -- sort of, sometimes, partially -- but you can't necessarily stay. The work, or the food, or the non-radioactive terrain is in the other place that does and doesn't feel like home. I often wonder why more contemporary literature doesn't address this complicated and consequential situation, not only because it is politically relevant, but also because it is dramatically so rich, so vexed and vexing, so ambiguous.

Rose Tremain, the author of nine novels and four books of short stories, is a past master of otherness, phenomenally adept at slipping into skins very different from her own. She has written about 19th century prospectors ("The Colour"), a 13-year-old boy ("The Way I Found Her") and a transgender heroine in 1950s Britain ("Sacred Country"), to name just a few. In "The Road Home" -- winner of the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction -- she proves herself again magically capable of animating a character from the inside out, illuminating the heart of one modern exile with an extraordinary degree of love, imagination and insight. The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forster famously exhorted. Particularly, connect us to the invisible, the lonely, the barely seen.