The book deals
with the challenges that immigrants face in assimilating into a post-colonial
Britain, readers must be curious to see how relevant the plot is today in this
post-Brexit period.
Set in
multi-cultural London, the book’s layered plot is sprawling, both
geographically and historically. Archie Jones, the indecisive forty-seven years
old English man, wants to take his own life after divorce from his Italian wife
Ophelia but is saved by Mo Hussein-Ishmael, a halal butcher. A little later, he
meets and marries a much younger Clara Bowden, a Jamaican, who is trying to
escape from the clutches of her religiously fanatical mother Hortense Bowden.
In the meantime, Samad Iqbal, Archie’s friend from Bangladesh, whom he met in a
British tank during WWII somewhere in Europe, immigrates to London with his
wife Alsana and takes up residence close to Archie. Samad is paralyzed in one
hand and works as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. Samad and Alsana have twins
- Millat and Magid, and the Jones’, a daughter named Irie. The children become
friends and share the experience of growing up as second-generation immigrants
in a multi-cultural London.
Samad decides
to send Magid, the elder of the twins by two minutes, to Bangladesh in order to
become a good Muslim while Millat takes to drugs and women before succumbing to
Islamic fundamentalism. Irie Jones, low on self-esteem and struggling with her
sexuality, falls in love with Millat, the religious zealot. The story gets more
complex when the white middle class Chalden family, who behave like colonisers,
is introduced into the melting pot. The mother Joyce Chalfen, a horticulturist,
believes that she can help the damaged Millat. Her zeal to reform Millat comes
at a price as she ends up ignoring her own family. Her son Joshua gets
alienated and ends up becoming a part of a PETA like group championing the
cause of animals. In the end, all three families are united by the project of
the geneticist Marcus Chalfen in a plot that has themes like history, fate,
religion, and identity intriguingly intertwined.
Unquestionably,
the book’s major theme revolves around raptures and ruptures experienced by
immigrants from former British colonies now living in a multi-cultural London.
Samad, Alsana, and Clara are first-generation immigrants who feel culturally
bereaved due to the loss of the familiar, including language, attitudes,
values, social structures and support networks.
They continue
to live in the past, suffer feelings of guilt over abandoning their culture,
and are stricken by anxieties that mar their ability to get on with their
lives. Even the second-generation characters of Magid, Millat, and Irie do not
feel connected to Britain despite being born there and struggle in their
individual ways to fit in. While Irie alters her Afro hair style to conform to the
British idea of beauty, Millat becomes addicted to drugs and women to assert
his identity.
The book
portrays multi-cultural London as a heartless place that makes it difficult for
immigrants to intermingle with the natives. Au contraire, in a beautiful
passage, Zadie Smith gives a glimpse of how immigrants have become a part of
the local world:
“This has been
the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of
the great immigrant experience. It is only this late in the day that you can
walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in
the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie jones humming
a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.”
The book’s
canvas is wide and the tale boisterous. The flamboyant albeit flawed characters
have historical connections to former British colonies – Jamaica and India. For
good measure, India’s first war of Independence of 1857 is also thrown in along
with Mangal Pandey who, like in the war, has a prominent role to play in the
narrative. The satirization of the English middle-class Chalfen family stands
out as cutting too close to the bone. The other side stories pertaining to
Jehovah’s Witnesses, a non-orthodox Christian sect of which Hortense Bowden is
a member, and an amorphous animal rights group that Joshua joins to rebel
against his father, are hilarious to say the least.
Zadie Smith’s
writing is impactful and energetic. She is a raconteur par excellence who, with
a dexterous touch, makes her riffs, stories, and characters move effortlessly
from warfront drama to experimental eugenics, from fanatic religiosity to
cultural archetypes, and from suppressed sexuality to colonial peccadillos.
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