At home on the Lane

Monica Ali's Brick Lane is one of those books that has been vaguely on my mental 'to-read' list for a long time. One of thos books that you know vaguely about but not very much because it has at some point been in the public consciousness. Maybe even one of those books that everyone knows about but nobody has ever read. Anyway, it just so happened to be April's book club choice, so like it or not, it went on to the reading list (yeah, ok so I could have just not read it, but I did want to read it and I like to be read new things anyway – which was a good amount of the point of this challenge).

As it happens, I did like it. For the most part, anyway. It was a book with a lot of questions and not a whole lot of answers, certainly no easy ones. That was something that I really liked about it. The differences between cultures, the idea of one being superior, the challenges faced by people in either – none of that is answered easily or definitively. It, for want of a better way of putting it, simply is. The same goes for the handling of issues of race and religious fundamentalism, it highlights them and shows them to be complex, with few easy options, but it portrays them from a fair and balanced perspective.

The two central characters and their inner struggles are also interesting. The way Nazneen deals with things and grows, struggling to reconcile different parts of herself with what she has been taught and what she is now experiencing is very interesting. The same goes for her husband, Chanu. He may be a bit of an idiot, but he's a loveable idiot. And through everything they go through, a genuine sense of love and affaction builds up between them, perhaps only really evident by the end.

I wasn't sure about the letters from Nazneen's sister in Bangladesh. They took some time to get used to and as a device they were good for showing what was not said as much as what was and of passing the time, but I still felt they jarred a bit at times. And actually the least satisfying and to my mind believable bit of the book was Nazneen's affair, her moment of taking control of her life for the first time. It just didn't seem very real to me. I guess sometimes people end up in weird situations or with weird people, but in this case it didn't really work for me. Overall I did enjoy it and it adds a lot to debates on multiculturalism as well as being a decent enough story, but I'm not sure it's worthy of a lot of the attention it received, which was probably a case of "New young ethnic female author writes about stuff post 9/11." So I'm a cynic. Sue me.

Book number: 31
Title: Brick Lane
Author: Monica Ali
Category: Book club/recommendations