Brick Lane

Monica Ali's novel follows the life of Nanzeen, a woman brought up in rural Bangladesh who moves to an East London estate at the age of 18 in an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her senior, Chanu.

As well as exploring the individual struggles of a woman trying to find her own identity, the novel considers the wider struggle of the bangladeshi and muslim community in the UK. From exploring the tangled web of relationships and love to the unrest of political islam, Brick Lane as a novel allows Ali to investigate all these issues in a way that gives the reader scope and perspective which may not be so easy to access from, say, a journalistic piece on the subject. Brick Lane is particularly effective as a novel because the ill-informed racism that faced the muslim community was a delicate issue in the aftermath of 9/11 when this novel was published. Yet the narrative perspective lends an identifiable voice and consequently, what could be a taboo subject becomes something understandable to the reader.

Although Nazneen is presented as an "outsider" in the novel with her rural bangladeshi roots and lack of english, ironically it is she that stays in London whilst Chanu, the Jane Austen reading, promotion obsessed husband, returns to Bangladesh at the end of the novel. This is ultimately due to Nazneen's acceptance of British culture (the good and the bad aspects) that Chanu can never understand. We also see snapshots of Bangladeshi life through Nazneen's letters from her sister, Hasina, and life there isn't as rosy as Chanu  and Dr Azad relentlessly compare life in England to. Her sister left her husband who beat her, and went on to experiences rape and forced prostitution in Bangladesh. She suffers infinitely in her position as a single, working class woman.

Nazneen feels little attraction towards Chanu who is frequently described making Nazneen shave his corns and cut his toenails because his stomach is too big for him to do it himself. "She sliced through the semi-translucent skin, the build up around the yellow core, and gathered the little dead bits in the palm of her hand.""Stomach growing goitre-like over his privates". Chanu's gluttonous belly embodies his inflated mind - full of close minded ideas, literature and values which also restrict him. He oozes repulsiveness, his long ironic lectures on ignorance get him nowhere. 
"'Why should you go out?' said Chanu. 'If you go out, ten people will say, "I saw her walking on the street." And I will look like a fool. Personally I don't mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?'"
"I am westernized now. It is lucky you married an educated man. That was a stroke of luck."
Yet, as the novel progresses, despite his frustrating ways, it is clear Chanu is a good man. He is an irritatingly loveable man. Shahana, Nazneen's daughter asks her mother towards the end of the novel "'I mean, have you ever been in love with him? Perhaps before he got fat?' Nazneen reached out to her daughter 'Your father is a good man, I have been lucky in my marriage.'" 
"Nazneen worked around the corn. There was a time when it disgusted her, this flaking and scraping, but now it was nothing. Time is all it took."
By the end there seems to be something that ties Chanu and Nazneen together. Love is a difficult emotion to explain, something novelists have battled with describing for centuries. So whether it is love that holds Chanu and Nazneen together whilst continents separate them or something else, it's not the repulsive man who needs his corns trimmed that Nazneen thinks of by the end of the novel.
"I can’t stay,” said Chanu, and they clung to each other inside a sadness that went beyond words and tears, beyond that place, those causes and consequences, and became a part of their breath, their marrow, to travel with them from now to wherever they went."

Love is a convoluted issue in the novel and isn't necessarily presented as a favourable entity. Ali presents such a complex argument to illustrate the paradigm of relationships in the Muslim community and on a wider scale. Where Hasina's love marriage ended in abuse and a life of turbulent unhappiness, Nazneen's arranged marriage provided her with stability and eventual happiness with her children although she never feels wholly in love with Chanu. One could question which kind of marriage is the better kind. She doesn't wholly understand passion or love "The woman on the other side whose bed thumped against the wall when her boyfriends called" until Nazneen also goes on to have a passionate affair with Karim, a young radical muslim "He was the first man to see her naked. It made her sick with shame. It made her sick with desire. They committed a crime."


"I'm talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I'm talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one's identity and heritage. I'm talking about children who don't know what their identity is. I'm talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I'm talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one's own sanity while striving to achieve the best for one's family. "

"If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men."



"The boys wore jeans, or tracksuits with big ticks on them as if their clothing had been marked by a teacher who valued, above all else, conformity."

"Why should you go out? ‘If you go out, ten people will say, “I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look a fool. Personally, I don’t mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?"

"A man cannot live without water…but he can bear the thought of no water. A man can live without sex... but he cannot bear the thought of no sex"

"she wore the Union Jack top over salwaar pants"

"You see to a white person, we are all the same: dirty little monkeys in the same monkey clan"