Fiction Given in marriage while still a girl to a man twice her age, Nazneen is a young Bangladeshi woman, who leaves her native village for life in a drab London flat. This is her story. Nazneen looks out on a world in which initially she cannot even understand the language being spoken around her.
Her husband, Chanu, is that most dangerous of beings, an educated man convinced his worth has never been realised, but whose hopes have sustained him for a long time.
Earlier this year, Granta duly published its third Best of Young British Novelists selection. If much of it proved predictable and not overly exciting, an impressive exception was the extract from this colourfully assured début. Monica Ali brings humour, grace and the special qualities of the best of Asian fiction to a narrative concerned with acceptance and denial; with passivity, rebellion and reality.
Innocently bewildered but far from stupid, Nazneen is a likable, sympathetic character. Marked from birth by the fact she had been believed to have been born dead, it appears to be understood by her that anything that subsequently happens is merely a bonus.
Home had been a village bound by myth and story. Its inhabitants are strange, even fantastic, complete with Banesa, the allegedly 120-year-old midwife. Mother is a saintly, doomed but heroic figure and the others are also ghosts.
Nazneen's urban wasteland London life is far more mundane, aside from glimpses of the Tattoo Lady, who "was always there when Nazneen looked out across the dead grass and broken paving stones to the block opposite . . . Morning and afternoon she sat with her big thighs spilling over the sides of her chair, tipping forward to drop ash in a bowl, tipping back to slug from her can. She drank now, and tossed the can out of the window."
Alone in the flat with the pathetic trophies of her husband's "success", the cheap furniture and gaudy rugs, "the carpet was yellow with a green leaf design. One hundred per cent nylon and, Chanu said, very-hard wearing. The sofa and chairs were the colour of dried cow dung, which was a practical colour," she is more servant than wife. Although Ali records her heroine thinking to herself that she "had everything here. All these beautiful things," her lonely unhappiness is obvious.
As is her role, that of fulfilling a function. Nazneen is another commodity to be stuffed into Chanu's cramped flat, along with his various framed certificates for this and that. But there is nothing sinister about his ownership. Her husband is clumsy and pathetic but kind, guilty only of dreaming for promotion and of being disappointed.
Achievement for him is his campaign for a mobile library, which of course, he will run. She is more passive, "life made its pattern around and beneath and through her." The tiny world of the flat is contained within the marginally larger one of the Bangladeshi community in London. On a local level, at least as far as Brick Lane is concerned, it is dominated by the formidable Mrs Islam, who as her name suggests, borders on the all-powerful. Second to her, and far more genuine, is chain smoking Razia, who has become determinedly British, forsaking her sari for baggy sweat shirt and jeans.
Ali follows Nazneen as she begins to grasp the difference between existence and survival. Early in the novel, in what is one of the most-telling of several fine set pieces, and not surprisingly the one chosen as the Granta extract, is an account of a supper party for one. In it, Nanzeen and the reader observe Chanu and his guest, Dr Azad, discuss life and juggle their own failures. Their conversation is conducted as a half-hearted battle of wills, featuring Chanu's career frustrations and the doctor's more profound sense of loss.
Running parallel with Nazneen's conventional life in an arranged marriage with Chanu, who repeatedly reminds her of her fortune in having "an educated man" as a husband, is the melodrama of her sister's chaotic adventures. Having run away for love, the impossibly-beautiful Hasina, disowned by her father, experiences the collapse of her romance.
On abandoning that relationship, she then takes on the dangerous role of being a single working woman in a culture that views such females with a suspicion approaching hatred.
Hasina's turmoil contrasts with Nazneen's stagnation. Reports of her various trials, written in a breathless wonder, are dispatched by her to London, where Nazneen reads these letters with a mixture of fascination and terror. If she is bored at least she is safe. In her first great act of self-assertion, she asks Chanu to find her sister.
"He got to his feet and cleared his throat. He stirred the lentils absently and lifted the lid from the rice so that the steam escaped and it would not be properly cooked. 'Well' he said, 'yes, I could go. I could go and walk around the streets and ask for her. "Have you seen my wife's sister? She just ran away from her husband, and she sent us this address: Dhaka." I'm sure it would not take long to find her. Perhaps one or two lifetimes."
While Brick Lane explores the life of a girl who becomes a wife and mother, experiences tragedy and survives, all the time maturing into a wise pragmatist who takes her chance at escapist romance, the true heart of this brilliant novel is Chanu. It is he who tries and rants, who quotes his beloved English literature, alienates and embarrasses his determinedly British elder daughter and eventually concedes failure. For all his foibles and delusion, he neither becomes a caricature nor loses our sympathy.
After years of struggle, it is finally time to return to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Or is it? Themes of cultural self-expression run throughout the narrative. In one of the most moving passages "Thirty or so years after he arrived in London, Chanu decided it was time to see the sights" Ali leads her brave and bickering little family out beyond the few narrow streets to the wider city. "Nazneen decided she would make this day unlike any other. She would not allow this day to disappoint him." Wry and intelligent, subtle and graceful in its mix of formal prose, blackly despairing humour and fabulous characterisation, this is a rich human novel. Challenged only by Ardashir Vakil's One Day, Brick Lane should give former-Booker winners, Margaret Atwood, Graham Swift and double-winners Peter Carey and even the great J.M. Coetzee more than a run for their collective money to this year's prize.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Brick Lane By Monica Ali Doubleday, 413pp, £12.99
