Chloë Ashby

The plight of the evacuee: Asylum Road, by Olivia Sudjic, reviewed

Ever since leaving war-torn Bosnia as a child, Anya has been on the move, hoping to find somewhere to belong

Olivia Sudjic. Credit: Colin Thomas

Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future. It begins and ends in a car — a couple ‘side by side, in motion with a change of view’ – and all the while the reader too is in a state of flux, unsettled.

That’s a state Sudjic’s protagonist, Anya, is familiar with. Along with other unaccompanied children, she was evacuated from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Sent to live with her aunt in Glasgow, she’s been searching for a sense of belonging ever since. At university she found ‘shelter and a certain amount of liberty, a veneer of cosmopolitanism’; in her stoic scientist fiancé, Luke, with his filial loyalty and fondness for repairs — ‘things which suggested reliability’. With his Cornish nationalist parents, she simply appreciates ‘any indication they did not view me as a parasite, looking for a fold in their family’.

There’s a restlessness to this novel, and at the same time restraint. No sooner has Sudjic inserted her principal characters into an environment than she sends them elsewhere. They slip through the Channel Tunnel — ‘the throat that had swallowed us beneath the waves’ — to the south of France, back to London, down to Cornwall, skywards in an ‘aluminium tube’ and south east to Sarajevo, where Luke meets Anya’s parents. She herself has had little contact with them; when she left, they became, first, ‘voices in a beige receiver’, then ‘a monthly check-in as unremarkable as menstruation’. Now her mother has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recognise her. An unresolved family trauma lingers.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in