Four years ago I published a book set in the East End, about a troubled young woman who lives and works in the vibrant multiethnic community of Bethnal Green. It was fun to write, and reasonably well-reviewed. But just before publication I turned around and saw a magnificent tidal wave filling the literary horizon, and approaching fast. ‘Another book about the East End,’ I thought to myself. ‘Wow, that looks rather impressive. I wonder what it is? . . . Glug. Glug. Glug.’
The tidal wave was a debut novel of stunning confidence and elegance called Brick Lane and, four years on, I am sitting in a Dulwich bistro with its author, Monica Ali, to discuss the film of the book, which is about to be released. Directed by Sarah Gavron, the movie is a jewel in its own right: a variation on a theme, rather than a straightforward translation of text to screen. But it is true to the delicacy of the original, the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who is brought to the East End by an arranged marriage, and finds illicit love in the arms of a young radical, Karim. The performance of Tannishtha Chatterjee, a prominent Indian arthouse actor, as Nazneen is particularly luminous.
Ali, who turns 40 this Saturday, made a conscious decision not to intervene in the making of the movie. ‘I thought I either have to be fully involved and try to write the screenplay myself, or I have to step away. I would have wanted to meddle if I had been involved at all, that wasn’t the right way to go. I had a feeling that if it was going to work as a film — which it probably wouldn’t because most films of a book generally don’t — then it has to be somebody else’s vision again, and somebody else’s work of art that they want to give birth to again, not just me trying to keep it true to the book. But she has, Sarah has actually kept quite true to the book.’
Fine-featured and thoughtful, her sentences punctuated by an appealingly raucous laugh, Ali wears her success and her intellect lightly. So it is hard to reconcile this instantly likeable person, sipping at her cappuccino, with the figure at the centre of the controversy around the film.
For reasons that remain opaque, a group of self-appointed Brick Lane ‘community leaders’ took against the movie, claiming that it was a ‘despicable insult’ to the neighbourhood, that the novelist was ‘not one of us’ and even that young people might ‘blockade the area’. In fact, the protests against the movie have been very small in scale, and other Bengali residents have expressed frustration that their views about Brick Lane should be misrepresented as homogeneously hostile.
Too late: the film company was unable to shoot on location and, shamefully, the Prince of Wales cancelled the Royal Film Performance of the movie, which was due to take place on 29 October (it will now receive its première three days earlier at the London Film Festival). Clarence House cited diary clashes, but conceded that the ‘appropriateness of the film chosen’ was also a factor. How little it now takes to scare a Prince off supporting an artistic enterprise.
Ali believes that an ‘outrage economy’ has arisen in which media and protesters (however unrepresentative) conspire to amplify anger. ‘People assume, having seen the pieces in the paper, that I’ve had a terrible time of it with feedback — but it just hasn’t been the case whatsoever. I have had a really positive response. One or two people are willing to cause a fuss, or are self-publicists and want to secure a position for themselves as spokespeople. It is ludicrous, and it happens in a way that wouldn’t happen outside of an ethnic minority. Why are those people the “community leaders”? They have not been elected to that position.’
Too true. Having reread the novel and watched the film, and being reasonably well-acquainted with the area, I remain baffled by the furore. Is it a battle over the very idea of Bengali Brick Lane, who is entitled to define it in the collective imagination, and who isn’t?
‘I think that there’s probably another agenda,’ says Ali, ‘which is that these are conservative men of a certain age. The idea that this book is about a woman finding some level of self-empowerment and along the way committing adultery, is something that they find very difficult to deal with.’
But surely she is disappointed by the Prince’s craven decision? ‘I think that the film is in the right place for it, at the London Film Festival. It’s a London film and that’s great. I’m disappointed that a public space starts to diminish, in a way, through self-censorship, I think that’s what disappoints me rather than the Royal Film Performance per se.’
She sets all this in the broader context of a crisis within liberalism that concerns her deeply. ‘The fact is that the liberal consensus that used to obtain on freedom of expression has broken down over the last two or three decades. That consensus rested on Enlightenment values and can in particular be traced back to J.S. Mill — the idea that it is the individual that needs protection from the tyranny of prevailing opinion. The individual should be at liberty as long as he does no harm to others. Or, using a Benthamite calculation of utility, the benefits are greater than the detriments. Mill discounts the kind of “moral harm” or “outrage” — disgust, indignation — which weigh so heavily in the balance today, pleading for the elevation of “reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit”.
‘We no longer discount these kinds of “harms” so readily because of the huge transformations, postwar, in our society. We want to have an equal respect for all people which entails having an equal respect for all cultures and ways of life. Therefore the kinds of “moral distress” or “harm” which are generated, for instance, by an art exhibition which some Hindus found “offensive” — such that they forced the exhibition to be closed [the closure in May 2006 by London’s Asia House Gallery of its M.F. Husain show] — are given an entirely different kind of consideration than they would have been given by Mill. For him the absence of outrage would have been a sign of a society in stasis; ironically, it is the rapid changes in society that have elevated outrage as a “harm”.’
Born in Dhaka in 1967, to a Bangladeshi father and English mother, Ali moved to this country aged three, and now has two children of her own, aged eight and six. She read PPE at Oxford and, as the preceding paragraphs make clear, she has retained a sharp interest in analytic philosophy. She denies being much drawn to metaphysics, but there is certainly a preoccupation with fate and personal choice in Brick Lane and in its (underrated) successor, Alentejo Blue, a collage of interlocked narratives set in the Portuguese village of Mamarrosa. Nazneen’s story has made the former novel a global bestseller because it is universal rather than specific to an east London postcode, addressing questions of identity, home and the extent of personal freedom in a world of apparently limitless choice and mobility.
‘It’s a book that really travelled,’ says its author. ‘For instance, in the States they don’t have much of a Bangladeshi community there, a lot of people responded in that way. They would tell me a story — “Oh, my grandfather was from Russia, and he always talked about going back to the old country, he never made it in the end” — or he did, and it had changed so radically, and he came back with his views again changed. So I think all of those feelings of longing and belonging are issues of our time.’< /p>
And this, of course, is one of many reasons why the novel remains such a resilient form: it provides an imaginative context in which world-views can collide and intermingle, without the necessity of definitive judgment or polemical certainty.
‘Various people keep announcing that fiction is over and the novel is dead, don’t they? V.S. Naipaul did it the other day didn’t he, bless him! It has an opposition but I think there is a space in the novel to explore without having to be prescriptive or pointing in one direction or another. That’s the great thing about fiction, that you can go along on somebody else’s journey with them to try to understand the world from another point of view. That’s the reason for writing fiction for me, that you can see through somebody else’s eyes.’
Another novel is in the pipeline, and she admits that when a work is in progress it is all-consuming, the one area of her life where she feels she is in the hands of fate. ‘I take the kids to school in the morning, and then I work until three o’clock. Then I’m with them, and then I work in the evening as well. I don’t work at the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, but I work far too late into the night. When I’m working I’m just working, and then I can stop and have down time. But I cannot leave it alone, it’s not very healthy really. I lie awake at night thinking about some small detail and the next day I think if I’d had a proper night’s sleep, I’d be much more efficient today!’
I doubt she has a choice, which helps to explain why she is already one of the best novelists in this country and has the potential to become one of the most important writers in the language. She has the steel, as well as the talent, to go all the way.
All power to her elbow, I say.
Brick Lane premières at the London Film Festival on 26 October and goes on general release on 16 November.