Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is a bioscope story, though to reach this insight you have to discard the accumulated hype that almost buries the book itself under a flood of gossip. Ali is the New New Thing, the new Zadie Smith, the new Rohinton Mistry, consecrated by her presence in Granta’s recent list of leading British novelists. More gossip. Ali prefers not to be pigeonholed as ‘Asian’, and sparked off a controversy when her publicist asked that the (coloured, Asian) Guardian critic Maya Jaggi be replaced by somebody with less, well, ethnic antecedents. Jaggi responded that this was the first time her background had been a factor in a long career; Ali’s publicist apologised for the "misunderstanding". So it goes.
All of that is so much baggage: Brick Lane will be remembered or forgotten for its own merits, or the lack of them. There are plenty of those, in both departments.
Nazneen is, to use the words of her husband, Chanu, "an unspoilt girl from the village" when she is uprooted via the instrument of marriage from Bangladesh to the exotic world of Tower Hamlets in London. The circumference of this strange new world is almost as narrow as her life in Mymensingh district, and initially far less colourful. Chanu appears to be unidimensional when you first meet him, "just another obtuse struggling subcontinental male", but he has depth, and a surprising capacity for a muddled tenderness leavens his apparent leanings toward patriarchy.
As they negotiate the deeps and shallows of marriage, occasionally plumbing the unexpected depths that even an arranged liaison can provide, Nazneen emerges from behind the veil of unassuming blandness draped over her features. In an especially poignant episode, the couple discover each other for the first time when they lose their first-born child. Two more children, Bibi and Shahana, will follow, though they cannot excite the same awe in Nazneen’s breast, the same sense of allowing her to rediscover the world through her baby’s eyes, as did the first, doomed child. As they muddle through their lives, in a world peopled by characters who skate close to the edge of stereotype but don’t always overbalance, Ali evokes a grandeur in the everyday that resonates through Brick Lane.
The deus ex machina which draws Nazneen past the lakshmanrekha of her normal life is Karim, a community leader and activist distinguished unfortunately by a tendency to strike Howard Roarkian attitudes. Running in parallel with the ebb and flow of life in and around Brick Lane are the letters that conjure up the hard-knock life of Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, back in Bangladesh. Cursed with beauty (yes, this is where things start to get a trifle predictable), Hasina works in a sweatshop, is forced to prostitute herself, discards or is discarded by various male protectors, and writes of these things in a curious patois meant to be either broken English or translated colloquial Bangla, which evokes risibility more often than any other emotion in the reader’s breast.
Ali’s style is unadorned, almost monotone, but it does set a gentle if unexciting rhythm. She evokes the sights and sounds of Brick Lane dutifully, in the manner of an able, evocative tourist guide, but her real achievement is in depicting the flawed but deeply touching and infinitely complex relationship between Nazneen and Chanu, a weak patriarch and ineffectual dreamer. She holds out the possibility of redemption for them, touches on their lives with a kind illumination. It’s more than she does for Hasina, who descends every so often from the oracular voice of women’s wisdom into the mawkish with a discernible thump: "All my life I look for one thing only for love for giving and getting and it seem such a thing full of danger can eat you alive and now I stop the looking it come right up to me and show all it tiny little teeth."
Despite the effective humour, despite the obvious affection for the people whose diverse lives she’s trying to illumine, Ali leaves us with the sense that Brick Lane is, after all, just a bioscope show. It provides the illusion of having travelled long distances and seen many distant marvels, explored the lives of strangers with great intimacy. It’s a charming illusion, but it makes a poor substitute for reality.
