This is Home by Luca Serra review: 'explores immigrant alienation'
Best read as a series of vignettes, Luca Serra’s new book examines the immigrant experience from a variety of different angles, writes David Robinson
Most fiction stays clear of the world of work, but Luca Serra’s debut novel is immersed in it, elbow-deep in the slimy waters of a London hotel’s underground kitchen potwash. Newly arrived from Italy, Carlos works there as a porter, barked at by chefs in a language he doesn’t understand and given all the worst jobs like unblocking clogged sink pipes and dumping the black bags of kitchen waste among the mice and rats of the rubbish room.
Not that work is the main theme here. As the title suggests, it’s what constitutes home: and as practically every character in the novel is a foreigner like Carlos, and almost every scene is set in Britain, the next question it poses is whether this country can ever provide the necessary feelings of solace and acceptance to immigrants.
In Glasgow, Polish illustrator Kamila, who has already been in the city for a couple of years, asks Brazilian au pair Brunilda, with whom she is beginning to fall in love, what she means by home. “It’s where you can be on your own for hours and hours without feeling lonely,” she replies.
This, though, is towards the end of the novel, by which time we have already seen how lonely Brunilda was on arrival in Glasgow, jetlagged and cold, unable to understand a word of Glaswegian and already missing her family and her granny’s flooded-out deli in Belo Horizonte. Through her eyes, we see that home is language too: being able to talk to people and to know that they will understand you and you will understand them is essential.
Brunhilda has worked hard at this. In a Glasgow chippie on her first day, she doesn’t understand what the woman behind the counter said to her after she ordered chips, so she asks if there’s been some mistake when she finds out that they are wet. Understanding dawns slowly: the word ‘vinegar’ enters her vocabulary, along with the realisation that Glaswegians address her as “hen”. She gives herself bonus marks for using second-level verbs like “peer” or “shiver” as well as complicated tenses and working out what people at the next table are talking about.
The novel’s London immigrants, by comparison (none, incidentally, marked out as being illegal) are an altogether sorrier bunch: Carlos himself is largely purposeless until he hears about the possibility of a free university education in Scotland, and his Lithuanian flatmate Marrok is still mourning the death of his girlfriend in a traffic accident when the landlord of his favourite pub commits suicide in front of his regulars.
Essentially, they’re stuck: as Thomas Wolfe noted, you can’t go home again. Carlos modifies this by showing that even if you do, it only confirms how right you were to leave in the first place. A new homeland is possible, but only when one is no longer lonely, homesick, broke and isolated by language.
Serra, a winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2020, explores immigrant alienation from many angles, but his book is best read as a series of vignettes. An Italian who has lived in this country since 2014, he writes in his second language and it would be wrong to say this does not show. In the first chapter, Carlos is “overwhelmed by an impetuous stream of consciousness”, and for large sections of the book the reader is too - particularly a 13-page chapter told from the point of view of a stainless steel pot.
According to the last census, over 10 million people in the UK were born abroad, most of them - like all those in this novel - arriving as adults. We are not well served by fiction about such people’s first contacts with our way of life, and for all its faults, This Is Home does at least try to remedy that.
This is Home by Luca Serra, Leamington Books, £10.99
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