Ali's in wonderland

When she was voted one the UK's best young novelists Monica Ali's first book was only a
manuscript. Now she's being hailed as a new Zadie Smith.

Harriet Lane
The Observer, Sunday 1 June 2003
Article history

Monica Ali: 'there's absolutely no star bullshit about her'. Photograph: PA

Monica Ali hasn't been published yet, but she is already famous. The books trade has been
muttering about her for 18 months or so, intrigued that her generous two-book deal was sewn
up on the basis of only a few chapters, and in January she was fast-tracked to the literary
frontline when Granta included her on its list of the best young authors after inspecting a
manuscript version of her first novel, Brick Lane: a magnificent coup, certainly, but the sort of
splashy advance publicity that tempts cold-water reviews. Now Ali is in an unusual, and
unusually dangerous, position. The publication of her debut novel tomorrow is something of
an event. But it has a lot to prove. Surely, Brick Lane can't be that good?
Actually, it's better. Focusing on a cross-section of the Bangladeshi community in Tower
Hamlets, a community all but invisible to the rest of London, Ali's novel is warm, shrewd,
startling and hugely readable: the sort of book you race through greedily, dreading the last
page. At its heart is Nazneen, whose arranged marriage brings her from the dirt tracks and rice
fields of rural Bangladesh to Tower Hamlets and a view of dead grass, broken paving stones
and net curtains. Nazneen has always known that it is pointless to 'kick against fate', unlike
her younger sister Hasina, who broke all the rules and ran away from her family for love - an
act of rebellion that in time invites the inevitable reproof.
Impressed by its stacking side-tables, patterned wallpaper and framed certificates testifying to
her new husband's proficiency in cycling and transcendental philosophy, Nazneen rarely
leaves the flat at first, but when she does she observes London with a Martian's perplexed
interest. Chanu, her windbag husband, is one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age,
with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the
self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously
loveable.
The book follows Nazneen and Hasina, living very different lives in very different places, but
finally daring to hope that they may have found a similar sort of happiness. The themes are
the big ones - identity, self-determination, the freight of family - and they are kept afloat by
the buoyancy of Ali's characterisation, which occasionally verges on the Dickensian without

ever resorting to caricature. In Nazneen's world, everyone is convincingly governed by their

own individual logic. Throughout, one is struck by Ali's ability to shift gracefully from
comedy to tragedy and back again.
Monica Ali, 35, lives in south London with her husband Simon, a management consultant,
and their two children, aged four and two. After PPE at Oxford, she drifted into marketing for
two small publishing houses, then worked at a design and branding agency. Somehow, writing
was always idling at the edge of her thoughts. 'On and off I've had an idea that it would be a
nice thing to be a writer, which is quite a different thing to having the urge to write. That came
quite late,' she says. 'And so did the confidence.'
When Felix, her first child, was just under a year old, Ali started to experiment with short
stories. One evening on the internet, she found a writing group - 'you'd submit a short story
and you'd get an online critique' - which didn't exactly teach her anything new, but gave her
the discipline to write a little whenever she could. 'And quite quickly I felt a bit constrained
by the short-story format, as though I didn't have room to breathe. There was something else
that I wanted to do. And then it was a question of getting up the courage.'
The courage finally came when her daughter Shumi was five months old. It almost looks as if
the pram in the hall was a factor in Ali's decision to give the writing a proper shot and she
agrees that, in the chaotic upheaval of motherhood, there was a 'pressing necessity' to find a
space for herself, even if it was only in front of a blue screen late at night. But the main factor,
she thinks, was the death of her maternal grandfather. 'I'd been meaning to take Shumi up, to
introduce my grandparents to the baby. But it's very difficult to get around to doing things
when you've got a toddler and a baby, and by the time we went up there, we were going to his
funeral. The next day, we went on to have a holiday in the Lake District. There's something
galvanising about a funeral. I felt the need to not put things off any longer. And I sent my
husband outside with the little ones, and I drew the curtains against the sun, and I started
then.'
Hoping for some constructive advice, she gingerly showed the first two chapters to a friend
who was doing an editing stint at Doubleday. By the following Monday, an offer was on the
table. She used part of her advance to fund childcare and so was able to dedicate mornings to
the novel, taking 18 months from the first sentence to the final editorial tweak. 'I worked very
intensively - I was, you know, obsessed. Anytime that I wasn't looking after the kids, I was
working.' Now she is gearing up to start her second. Superstitiously, she won't say much about
it.
Over lunch at her local, Ali is thoughtful and assured - circumspect, yet more relaxed than
your average first-time novelist of whom Great Things are expected. She knows her own
worth. This, you assume, is why she won't grumble about the Granta list making her a hostage
to fortune. She is confident about the book. 'People have been asking me about the Granta list
in a way that makes me think they want me to complain about it,' she says. 'But I'd be a fool to
complain about it, and I'm not going to. I'm so well aware what happens with first novels:
you're out there, waving a flag, and no one's passing in your direction.'
Not all of the advance press has been favourable. Maya Jaggi, a respected literary journalist
commissioned to interview Ali, recently went public about being turned down by Doubleday,
apparently on the grounds that Ali, nervous of being ghettoised, had vetoed her. Instead,
saying that Ali was keen to be seen as a writer first and a woman and 'coloured person'

second, the publicist suggested the paper use an alternative writer, who, unlike Jaggi, was
neither female nor Asian. Ali sighs when I raise this. She's not burning to put the record
straight, despite the fact that 'although it seems as though I'd been quoted, I hadn't'. No one
had consulted her about the interview; the publicity department had made a mistake; her
publishers have sent a letter to the paper concerned, clarifying this. That's an end to it, as far
as Ali is concerned, and she would really rather talk about something else. I wonder why she
isn't more anxious to clear her name for the record. Ali thinks for a minute.
'The thing is, it was a bit of a cock-up. But I don't want to rub anyone's nose in it. I don't want
to get hung up on what "people", that nebulous mass, think about me. That's the way to
unhappiness, I think.' She might not have been so sanguine, she supposes, if all this had
happened when she was in her twenties. 'Perhaps if I'd been getting this attention 10 years ago
when my idea of myself was much more hazy and contingent... I spent most of my twenties
wondering who I was. But now my identity is so bound up in my family, really.'
If you were going to design the ideal laboratory conditions for creating a novelist, you might
well sketch out Ali's own background. Her mother, Joyce, met Hatem, a Bangladeshi student,
at a dance in the north of England in the mid-Sixties. ('He arranged to meet her again,' says
their daughter, volunteering what's plainly a family joke, 'but he was worried he wouldn't
recognise her because all white women looked the same to him.') When Hatem returned to
Dhaka, to a job as an inspector of technical colleges, Joyce followed him and they were
married, much to the horror of his family who had already lined him up a wife. Though they
had little to do with his family after that, the Alis were content in Dhaka and would have
stayed there had the civil war not broken out.
They managed, with some difficulty, to return to Bolton. Although Joyce's parents had been
happy enough to see their daughter married, they were not so happy to see her return from
Dhaka with two children under five and a husband who found it hard to get work. For a long
time, the Alis ran a knick-knack shop ('trinkets, jewellery, beads, porcelain figures. All the
kind of things you see displayed in windows that have a net curtain raised in the middle');
much later, her father took a history degree, and then started to teach at the Open University,
while her mother became a counsellor.
'I think when my mum went off to get married, there weren't many Asians in the area, and the
ones that there were tended to be professionals - doctors, things like that. But when she came
back, eight years later, there had been a whole wave of immigration, and the socialacceptability stakes had declined dramatically.' Some relative suggested that if the children
were dressed carefully, no one 'need know'.
As in Dhaka, there were terrible rows, and suddenly ties were cut. But her English
grandparents were prepared, finally, to make some concessions. Ali can remember her
grandfather approaching her in the playground at junior school, holding out a big box, a glitter
set, 'and I can remember being really worried about whether I was allowed to take it because
of this rift. I was aware of its significance'. She took it. Before long, there was a truce.
But by this stage, Ali was already very conscious that she was on the far side of two cultures.
She doesn't want me to misunderstand, she had lots of friends at school, for instance; it wasn't
a case of standing on her own every break, feeling lonely. 'But on the other hand, you know
that you're working to fit in, discarding certain things. It does give you a different feeling, a
different perspective.' It is not a surprise that she admires Chang-rae Lee and Julie Otsuka:

writers, like herself, who explore 'cross-cultural intersections', who describe people on the
edge and, by so doing, get to the heart of things.
Brick Lane is published by Doubleday.

Monica Ali
Sukhdev Sandhu finds nothing cooking in Monica Ali's In the
Kitchen
By Sukhdev Sandhu
Last Updated: 11:04AM BST 05 May 2009

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali

Poor Monica Ali. Three books into her career and her publisher is already rewriting her
history, describing her new novel, In the Kitchen, as a brilliant follow-up to Brick Lane.
Well come to whether its brilliant in a moment, but first: follow-up? What happened to
Alentejo Blue (2006), a collection of interrelated short stories set in a village in southern
Portugal?
Admittedly, some readers, captivated by her fine-grained account of Bangladeshi migrants in
east London might have been surprised by her choice of location and subject matter, but its
bizarre that her own publishing house wants to erase that book from her bibliography. Ali has
run into a problem faced by many writers: shes assumed to have home turf from which
editors and accountants are eager for her not to stray. Shes being treated, deliberately or not,
as the mouthpiece for neighbourhoods and ethnic demographics of which she has never
claimed to be a member.

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In the Kitchen, then, marks a return to the contemporary London with which she, as much as
writers such as Zadie Smith, Iain Sinclair and Will Self, have now become staples of
university syllabi. It represents a shift to the west from Whitechapel to Piccadilly where,
in the kitchen of the Imperial Hotel, a place described as part prison, part lunatic asylum, part
community hall, an executive chef named Gabriel Lightfoot tries to whip into line a staff
force whose members are drawn from all across the world.
This is, in some ways, a post-imperial hotel. Its a low-paid hub for refugees and adventurers
from India, Somalia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Eastern Europe. These men and women are
invisible to the affluent guests staying in the establishment, and largely invisible to the rest of
London, too. However, they will, at least in outline, be familiar to anyone who has seen Dirty
Pretty Things (2002), directed by Stephen Frears, with whose grimy, subterranean milieu and
thriller-orientated plot this novel shares a striking resemblance.
Gabe is 42 and teetering on the verge of a midlife crisis. He would like his own restaurant, a
dream which, helped by a New Labour MP and a slightly skewy businessman, he may be on
the verge of realising. Hed also like to marry his girlfriend Charlie, a red-haired singer at
clubs that are far from upmarket.
All of these plans are disturbed and affected by the sudden death of a Ukrainian porter in the
cellars beneath his kitchen. Police investigations throw up nothing conclusive, but Gabe is led
to believe a mysterious Belarussian woman called Lena may know something important.
Soon, in cold and borderline-truculent fashion, she tells him about how she has been forced to
become a prostitute by human traffickers and that the lives of the people closest to her will be
endangered if he alerts the authorities. Soon, too, for reasons not at all explicable, he puts her
up in his flat and is sleeping with her.
Intercut with this highly dramatic story is a quieter one, probably belonging to another novel,
that involves Gabe regularly visiting his dying father in Lancashire. They talk a lot, mainly
oddly given the circumstances about race, migration, national identity and the waning of
community.
These sections would be more compelling if the dialogue between father and son were
realistic. But here, as throughout the book, dollops of didactic and clunky exposition are
combined with lines half-inched from episodes of The Bill and passages of insipid mushiness:
She had not believed him when he said that he loved her, Ali writes about Lena and Gabe.
Well, she had been right. But he loved her now, pure and true. If he had loved her before it
was only the blue flicker and red crackle, not this still white heart of the flame.

Ali appears to have researched the working lives of hotel kitchen staff. But she cant make
them come alive, having a Frenchman sound like a rodent in the film Ratatouille and
describing a Moldovan, in blunt and reductive style, as speaking in a stupid American
accent. Meanwhile, Gabe, the centre of the novel, is in every respect an unbelievable and
unpleasing character. Anthony Bourdains Kitchen Confidential (2000) and Imogen EdwardsJoness Hotel Babylon (2004) offer more insight, drama and laughter.
Its hard to avoid the suspicion that Ali is a middlebrow writer, and an essentially frothy one at
that, whose gritty choices of subject matter have convinced people shes writing literary
fiction. At one point, Gabe and Charlie emerge from a cinema on Edgware Road: Intelligent
thriller appears to be a contradiction in terms, the singer comments. Gabe replies: Werent
you thrilled? Clever plot. Give it that. Yes, Charlie answers, but thats a bad thing. All
plot, no story. Nothing unfolds, everything is forced. If Ali ever gives up writing novels,
shed make a great critic.
In the Kitchen
by Monica Ali