Full of East End Promise

Monica Ali's tale of British Asians,
Brick Lane, is painful and funny

Brick Lane
By Monica Ali
Doubleday £12.99, pp289

Monica Ali was famously voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis merely of the manuscript of this novel. She had not then published a single word, but she was one of only a couple of authors about whom the judges were unanimously and wholeheartedly agreed.
Now that we have a chance to read it for ourselves, this does not seem in the least surprising. Brick Lane has everything: richly complex characters, a gripping story and an exploration of a community that is so quintessentially British that it has given us our national dish, but of which most of us are entirely ignorant. Plus it's a meditation on fate and free will. Oh and it's funny too. And painful.
Nazneen is sent from Bangladesh to Britain at the age of 18 to be married to Chanu, knowing only two words of English - sorry and thank you - and not a soul. The most vivid image of the marriage is of her cutting her husband's corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. Chanu is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don't promote him or understand his quotations from Shakespeare or his Open University race, ethnicity and class module.
He is a magnificent piece of characterisation, as is Nazneen: a woman uneducated but perceptive, whose intelligence is in danger of being smothered by her own ignorance and sense of propriety. One of the questions of the novel is how much of her subtlety will ever be allowed a voice.
Throughout the book, there is a persistent undertow of back home. The characters are defined by being Bangladeshi years after they have left; even, in the case of Karim, who erupts into Nazneen's life when she should be a mature and settled woman, when they have never even been there. The pull of home, and the push of it, is dramatised by Hasina, Nazneen's sister, who took her fate into her own hands and made a love match, only to see the marriage fall apart and her life spiral out of control.
Appalling things happen over the years. A baby dies, in spite of his mother's determination to save him. Left without the protection of a husband, Hasina is raped, then forced to become a prostitute to survive. She has a friend whose husband drenches her in acid, having already done the same thing to a baby she would not give up for sale. More than one woman kills herself because her husband beats and humiliates her. Yet somehow the book is funny and full of hope. Hasina recounts the terrible things that happen to her in letters of ineffable sweetness, generosity and unintentional hilarity.
Nazneen could easily have been felled by loneliness and the feeling she has that 'hope and despair are nothing against the world and what it holds and what it holds for you'. But although much of her life is an object lesson in passivity, her character is honed by experience, grows less soft around the edges and turns out to be full of courage.
In a sense, not much happens. Nazneen has an affair, shockingly, even to herself. She, Chanu and their children, who are English enough to demand to wash their hair in shampoo rather than Fairy Liquid, have to decide whether to return to Bangladesh. But the novel manages to take in a great swath of immigrant experience, with its vivid minor characters, its scenes of absurd local politics and its focus on individuals thrown together, becoming families and trying to make their way.
Nothing is resolved in the end - Ali's characters are still living as if their state were temporary - but a great deal seems possible. This highly evolved, accomplished book is a reminder of how exhilarating novels can be: it opened up a world whose contours I could recognise, but which I needed Monica Ali to make me understand.

Reviewed By Geraldine Bedell