Book - Brick Lane by Monica Ali

In an effort to support local businesses, I bought this as an additional second hand to a couple of new ones. I always felt like it was a book I should have read so nearly two decades after it was written, I have.

The story revolves around a Bangladeshi teen, Nazneen, who married a Londoner, a man approaching middle age. Although her husband, a prolific reader and studier, is a ‘modern man’ less traditional than his Muslim peers, it was upsetting to read Nazneen was pretty much a prisoner in her corner of the tower block. When he comes home from work he is quoting her from the classics, I’m guessing this is influenced by the author’s Oxbridge education. At home, Nazneen looks out of the window and observes English life while cooking and cleaning a flat crammed with furniture. Dutifully putting up with her husband’s misguided optimism and stream of projects - hence the furniture. His aspiration is to go back to Bangladesh, even though he is British born. We see everything from drugs, to domestic violence, poverty to mental health issues and gangs and illegal money-lending both through the window and over in Bangladesh.

I found myself urging her to leave, learn English (why do you need to learn English for?), work and explore the capital and learn from it.

There are plenty of characters to fill this 400 pager, so many that I couldn’t keep track of them all. As has been said, Brick Lane is as much about social commentary on this particular corner of London’s East End and as such, I found it uncomfortable reading at times. Particularly during the flashbacks to Nazneen’s childhood in a small village and the letters from her sister who is on her own and now living in Dhaka.

Brick Lane certainly does paint a vivid picture of all those tower blocks I used to see travelling out from the City to the Docklands when the DLR first came into being resulting in businesses moving out there. Some of these buildings I still see on visits to this side of the capital, which is now unrecognisable from the mid 1980s that Nazneen would have seen. Having said that, I never visited the area when I worked just a few blocks away in Fleet Street during the early 90s. In this book, the image of people never leaving the few blocks around their home is laid bare; for them just going into the City and seeing ‘glass towers’ felt alien. To me, from that time in my life onwards, not leaving the UK at least once or twice a year seemed foreign.

Oddly enough I found myself in Brick Lane a couple of times while reading this book. Seeing some of those old restaurants that undoubtedly pop up disguised in the book survive the gentrification is gratifying.

It’s a slow read and took a while to get into. Life is too short to read a dull book. This isn’t that. It’s superbly crafted considering we had a dull character to start with. It’s the colourful people that Naznee knows that makes it interesting. So that’s Brick Lane ticked off the list.