Book: Brick Lane

Author: Monica Ali
Publisher:

Brick Lane, the debut novel from British writer Monica Ali, is an ambitious book. Although Ali has claimed she doesn’t want to be seen as representative of the Bangladeshi community in Britain, her novel attempts a panoramic view of the Bengali community as seen through the eyes of Nazneen, a young woman from a village who moves to London after her marriage at the age of eighteen. But despite all the hype – Ali was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2003 – Brick Lane is an uneven book, with as many flaws as there are flashes of brilliance.

Nazneen is married to Chanu, a somewhat educated Bengali who, despite all his certificates and diplomas hanging on the wall of their flat, is unable to hold down a steady job. Their abode is a tiny flat in Tower Hamlets, an impoverished estate with more than its share of problems. The women of the Bangladeshi community who reside in the estate are beset with problems too: domestic violence, oppression, children lost to Western ways and drug abuse, amid the backdrop of a monotonous routine of household chores and child raising. Nazneen too falls into this routine, and spends fifteen years of her marriage raising two children and clipping her husband’s corns and deferring to his wishes and ideas even when she becomes mature enough to understand how ridiculous they are.

The novel flashes back and forth between Nazneen’s life in the estate, her memories of life in the village as a child, and Bangladesh as it is today, through letters exchanged between her and her younger sister Hasina, who ran away from home for a love marriage but has now slipped down into the shame of prostitution. This makes for a story that is reminiscent of both Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But where these two novels captivated the reader with fascinating characters, lively dialogue, and sharp wit, Brick Lane instead provides too much description, too much detail, too many metaphors, and not enough plot or action, which weighs down the novel and makes its pages drag.

Not much happens in the book. We follow Nazneen’s life faithfully, taken through the typical events of the day, her relationship with her husband, who, beset by his own failures, begins to see a return to Bangladesh as the solution to all their problems, and her struggles with her daughters, who are torn between pleasing their father and developing their own identities. We are introduced to a somewhat clichéd cast of characters, including the gossipy moneylender Mrs. Islam, Nazneen’s long-suffering friend Razia whose son sells their furniture for drug money, and Dr. Aziz, the Bangladeshi who has made good economically but lost out on his family culturally.

The seminal event of the book is Nazneen’s affair with Karim, a young Muslim activist who brings her sewing jobs and organizes Muslim community gatherings for the residents of the estate. But Ali has long established Nazneen as a passive, inactive, and almost passionless woman, She Who Was Left To Her Fate, and so Nazneen’s reasons for embarking upon this affair remain unclear up till the very end.

The book succeeds very well in introducing the Bangladeshi community, centered on the East End area of Brick Lane from where Ali takes her title for the novel. Exotic restaurants, spicy food dishes, bhangra music and silk outfits mix and match on the page, and are described right down to the last pod of cardamom and the last gold tassel on the saris in the shop windows. In this way Ali has impressed Western readers, who are ever thirsty for windows into the many communities and cultures that make up London. But for Eastern readers, and those already familiar with the East’s hallmarks, there needs to be something more, and that is where Ali falters because she fails to provide a strong enough plot to keep the reader interested.

The other strength that Ali displays throughout is her characterizations. She starts off somewhat hesitantly, relying on old clichés and platitudes to illustrate the typical Bangladeshi in all his or her shades. But once she hits her stride, right around the point where Nazneen gives birth to her first child, the characters expand and deepen and become exponentially richer. Ali shows off her talents not just as an observer but as a philosopher of sorts, and her characters surprise us with beautiful perceptions about their lives, most especially Nazneen, whose evolution from village innocent to independent woman is somewhat predictable but still touching. Even Chanu, who deserves a good beating for his smugness and his perpetual failures, becomes a sympathetic character by the end.

In the end, Brick Lane disappoints more than it delivers. You get the feeling that you were waiting for something momentous to happen, something that kept you turning the pages in hope that it would, and it never really does. Ali has created a book that is rich in theme, but the plot and action that would have balanced it all out take a back seat to atmosphere and description. It’s possible that this style is the latest incarnation of the novel, but it requires a lot of patience on the reader’s part to get through to the very end.