In the Kitchen Monica Ali Doubleday, 432pp, £17.99

The figure at the centre of Monica Ali’s third novel is a chef running the restaurant of a large London hotel. Gabriel Lightfoot is 42 years old and has a small bald spot, a 37-year-old cabaret-singer girlfriend who wants to get married, and a dying father in Blantwhistle (a fictional former mill town that could be Bolton). He has provisional backing to open a restaurant of his own and is working at the Imperial for a year to prove himself to his backers while he plans the new venture. Just before the action of the novel begins, one of the porters has been discovered dead in the kitchen, but the police have been and gone already, and think that the death was probably accidental. Even though Gabriel has been instructed to look out for suspicious behaviour, In the Kitchen is too slow and digressive to be the murder mystery it at first promises to be, and he is too self-absorbed to be a detective.

Ali followed the success of her first novel, Brick Lane, with the wilfully different Alentejo Blue, which eavesdropped on the interior monologues of a large cast of directionless characters in southern Portugal. Understandably the publisher describes In the Kitchen on the cover as the “stunning follow-up to Brick Lane”, but the missing novel now seems less of an anomaly; the characters of Alentejo Blue encounter each other without really noticing each other, and in Brick Lane Ali was more interested in examining her heroine’s isolation than in being a novelist of multicultural London. Brick Lane was in fact a novel about a monocultural environment; the book’s newness to readers lay in its old-fashioned claustrophobia of setting (James Wood described this at the time as a return to “19th-century gravity”). Ali is clearly preoccupied with characters stuck in their heads through temperament and circumstance.

At more than 400 pages, In the Kitchen is too long and it does not help that most of Gabriel’s interior monologue is really a long-running inner pep talk: “No, Gabe knew about food all right, had forgotten more than most of them would ever learn. And if a dimming of passion was all he had to worry about, then, for God’s sake, he was doing well.” Gabriel is not a perceptive character and the novel cannot make up its mind whether to see everything through his eyes or to describe his thoughts from the outside. Nikolai, the Russian commis chef who refuses to be promoted, is the object of Gabriel’s more articulate register: “He was like some overgrown student, no, some underground revolutionary leader, watching and waiting, biding his time.” There is little ambiguity about the dialogue, however, which includes the following exchange between Gabriel and one of the kitchen staff:

“Your English is excellent,” said Gabriel.
“Thank you. English is our official language in Liberia.”

The actual plot is slight, and the hotel’s real secret so easy to guess that it is almost irrelevant. Gabriel, however, is the last person to work out what has been going on and the novel concentrates on the effect the revelation has on him, rather than the secret itself. But in the final 50 pages he becomes more compelling than we could have had any reason to expect, and it turns out that In the Kitchen really is a mystery story – the kind where you’ve been following the wrong clue all along, and one that it would be wrong to give away here. The reversal shows that Monica Ali is not afraid to take risks, even the risk of boring her readers, but it comes so late in the novel that it almost doesn’t work at all.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website