Monica Ali: Brick Lane

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

It's not often that a book captivates from its very first page, with the enchantment carrying you right through to the last word, 400 pages later. But this one does.

Ali's voice is distinctive: compassionate, wry, sharply observant, and her writing is as stuffed full of metaphor and flavour as her heroine's fridge is with spicy leftovers. The story - saga, really - is narrated by Nazneen, a young Muslim Bangladeshi woman brought from her rural village to a run-down block of flats in East London to marry a man selected for her by her father.

The novel progresses through the years from 1967 with the premature birth of Nazneen herself, and her mother's reverberating decision to Leave Her To Her Fate, right up to the present day, even including the anti-Muslim feeling fanned by the September 11 attacks in the United States.

While it is in some ways a story of "the immigrant experience", the main trajectory is Nazneen's progress from fatalism to active agency in her own life, precipitated by various crises and peaks of plot.

Part of the story comprises letters to Nazneen from her sister back in Dhaka, revealing the tragic precariousness of life there, but most of Brick Lane takes place within the tiny flat Nazneen lives in with husband Chanu and, later, their two English-born daughters. Nazneen's dreams and imagination, however, expand her universe far beyond the peeling wallpaper and noisy neighbours.

Towards the end of the book, the family ventures out for a rare excursion. "Thirty or so years after he arrived in London, Chanu decided that it was time to see the sights," as Ali puts it.

A bus conductor looks at the family: "At a half-glance he knew everything about Nazneen, and then he shook his head and walked away."

Of course, he knows nothing about her, just as her husband and daughters have no idea of the person they take so much for granted. In such ways does Ali give the lie to the kind of racism (and sexism) that exists in stereotypes. The Bangladeshi characters are not much better: "Ignorant types," as Chanu is always complaining about the English.

Chanu himself, a good man who does not beat his wife, is at once profoundly irritating and selfish, and yet, filtered through Ali's love for her characters, sympathetic. Like Nazneen, we do not wish to see him hurt.

So when Nazneen begins a secret affair with handsome, arrogant Karim, the hidden tensions of their tight little world intensify, and we fear for what may happen.

This first-time author, half-Bangladeshi, half-English, Oxford-educated, has been hyped in the United Kingdom since January when, on the strength of the unpublished manuscript for Brick Lane, she made Granta's prestigious, once-a-decade list of best British novelists under 40. Ali's work has been likened to another on the list, Zadie Smith.

Ali joins Smith, Hari Kunzru (whose The Impressionist was last year's blockbuster British-ethnic novel) and others as new, exciting voices of post-colonial Britain, opening up the experience of minority groups to a much wider readership. Fascinating from start to finish.

Doubleday, $34.95