THROUGH A LENS SHARPLY
After a 10-year hiatus and what she describes as a loss of confidence, Monica Ali talks about her fifth novel with Bron Sibree
Ask British author Monica Ali anything at all about her acclaimed new novel, Love Marriage — or, for that matter, her stellar literary career — and she’ll answer with disarming honesty. There is nothing rehearsed or glib about this author who shot to literary stardom with her debut, Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, and adapted into the 2007 film of the same name. She’ll happily talk about the foibles of each of the characters that populate Love Marriage — her fifth novel — as if she has known them all her life. Yet she’ll just as readily admit that even now, two months after its release, and after speaking about it to many readers, she remains at a loss to “sum it up in a couple of sentences. I think it is always tough for writers to sum up a book. It takes me a few months to be able to, but this book doesn’t really fit into a box.”
But the one thing it is not about, insists
Ali, “is a clash of cultures. I’ve seen this book described as being about a culture clash. Yes, it’s multicultural, but there is no clash of cultures. It’s really not as simple as that.”
Indeed, Love Marriage hinges on the upcoming marriage between 26-year-old trainee doctor Yasmin Ghorami, whose parents were originally from India, and fellow doctor Joe Sangster, the son of a famous feminist mother, Harriet, who once posed nude for a magazine photo, exposing her genitalia.
“Harriet,” chuckles Ali, “would be a lot for anyone to meet. She’s outspoken in her opinions and open about sex, which the Ghoramis never mention. She’s also truly posh. She’s upper middle class, so it’s the class distinctions and all those areas that I’m probing, and finding the pain points.”
From the moment she conceived of Love Marriage, Ali says, “I knew at one level that sex would be the thread on which all the narrative beads would be strung.” Yet in many ways the novel takes its cues from Jane
Austen in that it starts out as a kind of comedy of manners then deepens into something more profound.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of Austen’s work, and I’ve been inspired by her in a way for this book. She wrote about engagements, courtships and marriage endlessly and yet with that rather narrow domestic prism she was able to show a lot about society at that time. Today we’re in a very different landscape, but I think the customs and rituals, expectations and family dynamics that surround the planning of a wedding can still be a useful lens onto the wider society.”
Ali’s sharp lens takes in class, gender, race, sexuality, all the generational and cultural tensions of contemporary society. She also peers into a little known corner of modern therapy, the vexations of ageing, and much more besides. Her keenly observed characters and their dialogue are testament to her fabled humour and compassion. Yet any way you describe it — comedy of manners, family saga, social comedy — this brilliant and deeply engaging 500-page novel manages to slip conventional moorings as well as expectations as it unfurls a tale of love and misunderstandings, betrayals and long-held secrets with all the compulsive power of a thriller, complete with a sting in its tail.
Oxford-educated Ali has never been predictable on the page. A fervent believer that writers must keep challenging themselves, she has lived up to that since penning her bestselling debut, covering different ground in each of her subsequent novels, including Untold Story, her fourth, which reimagined a Princess Diana-like character’s post-fame life.
Much has been made in media reports about the decade-long hiatus between
Untold Story and Love Marriage and the loss of confidence that caused it. “I did have a loss of confidence,” says Ali, “and I stopped writing. But when I wasn’t writing I got depressed and that fed even more into the lack of confidence, so it became a sort of downward spiral.”
Yet contrary to much reporting, she explains, it wasn’t negative reviews for
Untold Story that shattered her confidence.
“It was something much more fundamental for me, and it’s taken me quite a lot of therapy to work it out. It was the feeling that my authenticity was being questioned. People would say things like ‘this is a bewildering choice of subject matter for this author’,” says Ali, who is the daughter of an English mother and a Bengali father and has lived in Britain all her life.
“I am British so it is not as if I was stepping outside my experience. It was, actually, this is me. I was as fascinated with Diana as many, if not most, people in the UK were, so it was quite insulting.”
Ali has long believed that all writing is political. “How can it not be?” she quizzes. “As George Orwell said, the idea that art, including writing, should not be political is in itself a political notion.”
An avid and eclectic reader, she also believes that reading can increase a person’s empathetic abilities. “But for that to happen,” says Ali, “the writer has to be able to empathise with his or her characters. Empathy is a key aspect of human existence and is fundamental to the writing of fiction. It is the beginning of all morality.”