Brick Lane — named after Brick Lane, a street at the heart of London's Bangladeshi community — follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to Tower Hamlets in London at the age of 18 — her English consisting of "sorry" and "thank you" — to marry an older man, Chanu, described by
The Observer as "one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." Geraldine Bedell wrote in
The Observer that the "most vivid image of the marriage is of her [Nazneen] cutting her husband's corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. [Her husband] is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don't promote him or understand his quotations from Shakespeare or his Open University race, ethnicity and class module".
Controversy
The novel caused controversy within the Bangladeshi community in Britain because of what certain groups perceived as negative portrayal of people from the Sylhet region. The majority of Bangladeshis living in Bricklane are originally from Sylhet. (Ali is from Dhaka.) Parts of the community were opposed to plans by Ruby Films to film parts of the novel in the Brick Lane area, and formed the "Campaign Against Monica Ali's Film Brick Lane". The film, starring well-known Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee, was successfully made and distributed both in the UK and internationally.
[[Germaine Greer]] expressed support for the campaign, writing that : "As British people know little and care less about the Bangladeshi people in their midst, their first appearance as characters in an English novel had the force of a defining caricature ... [S]ome of the [[Sylheti]]s of Brick Lane did not recognise themselves. [[Bengali people|Bengali]] [[Muslim]]s smart under an Islamic prejudice that they are irreligious and disorderly, the impure among the pure, and here was a proto-Bengali writer with a Muslim name, portraying them as all of that and more." Greer further criticised Monica Ali's lack of authenticity and misrepresentation on the grounds that the author had never spent any considerable length of time in Brick Lane, and could not even speak the [[Bengali language|Bengali]] language fluently any longer. Greer's involvement has angered some within the British literary community. [[Salman Rushdie]] has called it "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but ... not unexpected".
Activists told
The Guardian they intended to burn copies of Ali's book during a rally to be held on July 30, 2006, but the demonstration passed without incident.
Ali herself portrays the elders of the community as reluctant to face criticism of the youth: "There were no gangs at all. The white press had made them up to give Bangladeshis a bad name..."
Richard & Judy Bookclub
Although
Brick Lane was selected for the first Richard & Judy Book Club in 2004, the Richard and Judy producer, Amanda Ross, has subsequently admitted publicly that she regretted selecting Ali's book for the program. Ali failed to turn up for the book club award ceremony, and Ross claims that Ali was not as supportive of the book club as she would have hoped.
Brick Lane is the only book that Ross selected for the book club that she says she didn't believe in.
Film
The book was adapted to a film of the same name in 2007.
