Brick Lane
Monica Ali Transworld/Doubleday, 413pp, £12.99
ISBN 038560484X
Monica Ali's first novel, Brick Lane, exposes a hidden world and allows the reader a detailed and fascinating glimpse into British Bengali culture. Ian Jack noted, when he explained why he and the Granta panel had included Ali in their list of the 20 most promising young British novelists, that her prose brings us "news" about contemporary Britain in a way that only fiction can. Living as I do right at the top of Brick Lane in east London, I certainly feel more informed about the people who are my next-door neighbours than I did before I read this book.
Ali's protagonist is Nazneen who, after a traumatic birth in 1967, grows up in East Pakistan, the old province of Bengal, which becomes independent Bangladesh four years later. After a settled and rural upbringing in a village, an arranged marriage brings her to Tower Hamlets, London, in 1985. Chanu, her husband, is much older than Nazneen and as well as being physically repulsive he becomes bitter and irascible. Despite his superior education, he is not appreciated by his white colleagues at the council and is sacked. He never fully recovers from this blow and is thereafter constantly in and out of employment. All his attempts to improve his chances by doing Open University courses and the like prove fruitless.
Meanwhile, Nazneen finds that, after the initial shock of coming to England and enduring the racism of early 1980s London, she is increasingly able to adapt. After the death of a baby and the birth of two daughters, she establishes with torturous slowness - the process takes the best part of the 1990s - a degree of independence in the new millennium. Chanu's inability to find work obliges her to take on piecework as a seamstress; the family invests in a sewing machine and she begins work at home. The middleman who brings the garments to the house is Karim, a young and attractive Bengali. Karim is practical and active rather than intellectual and slovenly: a perfect counterpoint to her hopeless husband. Karim attempts to organise a committee to tackle the growing epidemic of drug-taking and petty fighting that is fragmenting the Bengali community in and around Brick Lane. He also embarks on an affair with Nazneen, the consequences of which could destroy all of them.
What makes this novel, apart from its subject matter, is its rich realism; it is not afflicted by the magic-realist adornments of Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy. Monica Ali has much in common with the early V S Naipaul. Chanu is Mr Biswas reincarnated. He is a poignant, self-loathing, loathsome but ceaselessly self-improving character whom the reader feels sympathetic towards despite his failings.
Brick Lane has all the trappings of a successful commercial novel as well: the focus on one woman's struggle for independence, her appalling husband, her household troubles and, naturally, the handsome young lover. It is no surprise that it was bought by a mass-market publisher such as Transworld.
It will be fascinating to see what Ali does next. Will she pursue the commercial route and recount more romances in the East End and become, if you like, the Maeve Binchy of Bengalis in the UK? Or will she follow Naipaul by refining the fundamental themes she raises here?
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