The kitchen debate
By William Grimes |
August 9, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ALTHOUGH she's still in the early stages of her career, Monica Ali's main themes are already coming into focus. "In the Kitchen," like her wildly successful first novel, "Brick Lane," takes on multicultural, postcolonial Britain. What does it look and sound like? Who gets included? What are its prospects?
In the Victorian era, writers like Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell wrestled with such questions in the "condition of England" novels. Ali, an upper-middlebrow traditionalist, follows in their footsteps. In "Brick Lane" she explored, with gusto and pathos, the Bangladeshi immigrants and British no-hopers living in Tower Hamlets, an East London housing project.
This time around, she ties her story to two self-contained social structures that allow her to trace Britain's fault lines: the busy kitchen of a hotel restaurant in central London, where Gabriel Lightfoot, her main character, is executive chef, and an old mill town in the north of England, where Gabriel's dying father has worked all his life.
Gabriel's kitchen is immigrant Britain on display. "Every corner of the earth was represented here," he reflects at one point. "Hispanic, Asian, African, Baltic and most places in between." These are the drones who toil unseen in glittering London, desperate strivers, many with horrible stories to tell, or forget.
As the novel begins, a Ukrainian kitchen worker turns up dead in one of the hotel's subterranean passageways. His former lover, a sullen, waiflike pot-scrubber named Lena, becomes Gabriel's personal reclamation project and his entryway to the underground economy, a shadowy world of illegal immigration, slave labor and forced prostitution. This is the new Britain.
The old Britain doesn't look much better. The fiery furnaces and satanic mills that terrorized Carlyle and Dickens barely exist. "Great Britain," Gabriel's father remarks, "no one says that anymore ... We've lost the 'Great.' Know what else we've lost? Britishness. People keep talking about it. That's how you know it's gone."
Ali, who has a wonderful ear for Britain's welter of new speech patterns, makes her shrewdest points by giving her characters free rein to argue back and forth about the tangled issues of race, culture and progress.
A maddeningly flexible Labor politician, one of Gabriel's backers in a new restaurant venture, delivers a splendid oration showing that, depending on how you look at it, Britain has either shed its dead industrial skin to become a dynamic knowledge-based economy or put over a colossal fraud. Ignore the New Labor spin, he says, and you see a nation that no longer makes anything, a "gigantic casino spinning speculators' money, while asset-stripping vultures shred company pension schemes and turn the few remaining factories into luxury flats and shopping malls."
The brilliant debates animate an otherwise meandering, overstuffed narrative that, for long stretches, goes nowhere in particular. With Zola-esque diligence, Ali plunges the reader into the workings of a professional kitchen and the arcana of the weaver's trade. Gabriel's personal problems are largely irrelevant to the novel's more serious concerns. Obsessive, narcissistic and vacillating, he offers yet another variation on the commitment-shy modern male. About custard he holds firm opinions. Everything else flummoxes him. Gabriel is a small man on a big stage. By the novel's end, he looks minuscule, a pipsqueak tyrant screaming for the reader's attention. The temptation is overwhelming to slam the book shut and squash him like a bug.
In the Victorian era, writers like Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell wrestled with such questions in the "condition of England" novels. Ali, an upper-middlebrow traditionalist, follows in their footsteps. In "Brick Lane" she explored, with gusto and pathos, the Bangladeshi immigrants and British no-hopers living in Tower Hamlets, an East London housing project.
This time around, she ties her story to two self-contained social structures that allow her to trace Britain's fault lines: the busy kitchen of a hotel restaurant in central London, where Gabriel Lightfoot, her main character, is executive chef, and an old mill town in the north of England, where Gabriel's dying father has worked all his life.
Gabriel's kitchen is immigrant Britain on display. "Every corner of the earth was represented here," he reflects at one point. "Hispanic, Asian, African, Baltic and most places in between." These are the drones who toil unseen in glittering London, desperate strivers, many with horrible stories to tell, or forget.
As the novel begins, a Ukrainian kitchen worker turns up dead in one of the hotel's subterranean passageways. His former lover, a sullen, waiflike pot-scrubber named Lena, becomes Gabriel's personal reclamation project and his entryway to the underground economy, a shadowy world of illegal immigration, slave labor and forced prostitution. This is the new Britain.
The old Britain doesn't look much better. The fiery furnaces and satanic mills that terrorized Carlyle and Dickens barely exist. "Great Britain," Gabriel's father remarks, "no one says that anymore ... We've lost the 'Great.' Know what else we've lost? Britishness. People keep talking about it. That's how you know it's gone."
Ali, who has a wonderful ear for Britain's welter of new speech patterns, makes her shrewdest points by giving her characters free rein to argue back and forth about the tangled issues of race, culture and progress.
A maddeningly flexible Labor politician, one of Gabriel's backers in a new restaurant venture, delivers a splendid oration showing that, depending on how you look at it, Britain has either shed its dead industrial skin to become a dynamic knowledge-based economy or put over a colossal fraud. Ignore the New Labor spin, he says, and you see a nation that no longer makes anything, a "gigantic casino spinning speculators' money, while asset-stripping vultures shred company pension schemes and turn the few remaining factories into luxury flats and shopping malls."
The brilliant debates animate an otherwise meandering, overstuffed narrative that, for long stretches, goes nowhere in particular. With Zola-esque diligence, Ali plunges the reader into the workings of a professional kitchen and the arcana of the weaver's trade. Gabriel's personal problems are largely irrelevant to the novel's more serious concerns. Obsessive, narcissistic and vacillating, he offers yet another variation on the commitment-shy modern male. About custard he holds firm opinions. Everything else flummoxes him. Gabriel is a small man on a big stage. By the novel's end, he looks minuscule, a pipsqueak tyrant screaming for the reader's attention. The temptation is overwhelming to slam the book shut and squash him like a bug.
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