by Zadie Smith, 2000
In-depth study of London from the eyes of a diverse caste of characters: 1. Bangladeshi immigrants, Samad Iqbal, his wife Alsana, and their twin sons, Millat and Magid. 2. Archie Jones, and his wife, Clara, who is black and the daughter of Hortense, a Jehovah’s witness born in Jamaica. 3. Archie and Clara’s daughter, Irie, the one I loved the most. 4. The Chalfen family, white, educated: Joyce, the mom, a horticulturist; Marcus, the proud dad scientist working on “FutureMouse,” Josh, the oldest son, who becomes cool when Millat and Irie enter his life.
I learned about this book from the British Classics puzzle. It is extremely well-written, and a deep-dive into the thoughts and feelings and antics of lower and middle class immigrant, minority Brits.
I liked it. It took a while to read it. It is a long book, 448 pages. Irie is my favorite character because she just is the way she is. The one time she tries to be something different, she has her beautiful wavy long 1/2 black, 1/2 white hair straightened, but she didn’t tell the stylist she has washed it and the straightener burnt her scalp and her hair. They had to cut it off and attach fake hair. She learned to love herself the way she was – big and beautiful. She adored the twins, Millat and Magid, loved them both. Samad, the dad of the twins, decided to send one of them back to India (Bangladesh) because he didn’t like them becoming so English. He chose Magid, who was a young budding scientist, and he tricked him into going to the airport and then sending him on his way. Samad’s wife, Alsana, didn’t forgive him until Magid comes back, a young man, very atheist, and very much an Englishman, and a scientist. The Chalfen’s, Marcus and Joyce, have 4 sons of their own but take on Irie and Millat as their project when Irie and Millat and Joshua, their son, get caught smoking pot at school. The punishment is for Irie and Millat to go to the Chalfen’s for study sessions several times a week. Joyce falls in love with Millat and he becomes her special project. He’s a hopeless bad boy – then becomes a member of an Islamic Militant Society – KEVIN – Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, “We are aware that we have an acronym problem.”
The patriarchs, Samad and Archie, were in WWII together, in a tank. Archie was the driver, Samad was the radio operator. They were very, very young. Archie becomes a paper folder (!) in London, Samad becomes a waiter in an Indian restaurant. Samad married a younger woman, Alsana, and tells Archie that is the key to happiness. Archie meets Clara at a New Year’s Eve party, the morning after, and she is much younger than him and black. He’s at the top of the stairs and she is sitting on the bottom step. She looks up and he looks down from the heights. She marries him. Neither marriage is happy, but they stay together. Clara has Irie, and Alsana has the beautiful twins, Magid and Millat. The story is mainly about these three children growing up in London.
Zadie Smith is an incredible writer. She doesn’t mind giving lots of interesting detail. She is laugh out loud funny in spots. She can really create people and places you can see and feel. Alsana has a niece who is a lesbian and Alsana calls her “Niece-of-shame” always and to her face, and Niece-of-shame just loves her back and stays always and forever in her life. Just one example.
Here are some tidbits from the book:
Page 85, Samad and Archie are in the village after their tank blew up and all of the crew were killed except them. They’ve been drinking, they have no radio, they don’t know the war ended two weeks ago. Samad grabs Archie’s hand:
“Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home–if you, if we get back to our respective homes–if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,” and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, “hold your judgment. If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.”
Page 176-177: Alsana is grief-stricken, outraged, that her husband (Samad) has kidnapped their son (Magid) and put him on a plane to Bangladesh at the age of 12 in hopes he will become less English, more Bengalis. She writes about people who hold lightly to their lives because they live in constant danger.
“People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.
“It is different for the people of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal. They live under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mudslide. Half the time half their country lies under water; generations wiped out as regularly as clockwork; individual life expectancy an optimistic fifty-two, and they are coolly aware that when you talk about apocalypse, when you talk about random death en masse, well, they are leading the way in that particular field, they will be the first to go, the first to slip Atlantis-like down to the seabed when the pesky polar icecaps begin to shift and melt. It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s ideas of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy. You don’t need to give out questionnaires to Bengalis. The facts of disaster are the facts of their lives. Between Alsana’s sweet-sixteenth birthday (1971), for example, and the year she stopped speaking directly to her husband (1985), more people died in Bangladesh, more people perished in the winds and the rain, than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden put together. A million people lost lives that they had learned to hold lightly in the first place.
“And this is what Alsana really held against Samad, if you want the truth, more than the betrayal, more than the lies, more than the basic facts of a kidnap: that Magid should learn to hold his life lightly. Even though he was relatively safe up there in the Chittagong Hills, the highest point of that low-lying, flatland country, still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies…”
On page 178, Alsana is going around to all her friends and relatives for comfort after the kidnapping of Magid by her husband, Samad. They would feed her good curry and sympathize with her, “but her gut told her that though the curry was sound, the commiserations were not all they seemed. For there were those who were quietly pleased that Alsana Iqbal, with her big house and her blacky-white friends and her husband who looked like Omar Sharif and her son who spoke like the Prince of Wales, was now living in doubt and uncertainty like the rest of them, learning to wear misery like old familiar silk…
“Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. Alsana sensed all these and more at the other end of her telephone line as the calls flooded in–May 28, 1985–to inform her of, to offer commiserations for, the latest cyclone.”
Page 196, Alsana and Samad are arguing (they argue and fight, physically, a lot) and Samad tells her to look up what a Bengali is, and Alsana looks it up in the encyclopedia, BALTIC-BRAIN, and learns that most Bengalis are descended from Indo-Aryans who migrated from the west and mixed with other races and cultures. Here is what she exclaims to Samad after finding this out:
“Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans . . . it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show,” said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!”
Page 315, Irie runs away in the middle of the night to her grandmother, Hortense in a basement flat in London. Hortense is a Jehovah’s witness, born the love child of her mother, Ambrosia, and English Captain Durham, in Jamaica, during the earthquake in Kingston on January 14, 1907. Hortense is now 84 years old. “Still, eighty-four is not seventy-seven or sixty-three; at eighty-four there is nothing but death ahead, tedious in its insistence. It was there in her face as Irie had never seen it before. The waiting and the fear and the blessed relief.”
Page 336, Samad is lamenting to Irie how disappointed he is in his sons.
“There are no words. The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white-suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green-bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother,” said Samad bitterly, betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country, “I really do. These days, it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started . . . but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers–who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil’s pact . . . it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere.”
Page 439, they are at the ceremony for the launching of FutureMouse and Hortense and her Jehovah’s witnesses are singing loudly and Samad is sent outside to silence them.
“The Witness women raise their voices, sending song up into the firmament. “Early will I seek thee,” sings Hortense. “My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is . . .”
“Samad watches it all and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to silence her. Partly because he is tired. Partly because he is old. But mostly because he would do the same, though in a different name. He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land–horrible, persistent–the thirst that lasts your whole life.”
In the end, Archie saves Millat from murdering a scientist, Dr. Sick, who Archie supposedly shot way back during the War – a sick, brutal, evil scientist, by taking the bullet (in the leg) intended for him. The courts are so confused by the different stories that Millat and Magid both are ordered to 400 hours of community service in the park gardens that Joyce Chalfen is creating on the banks of the Thames. Beloved Irie and her little girl (who is either Millat or Magid’s as Irie made love to both of them in a fit of passion on the same night) and Hortense and Joshua (Marcus and Joyce Chalfen’s oldest son) all go to live by the Caribbean Sea. And Archie and Clara, Samad and Alsana all go to O’Connell’s together (December 31, 1999, Abdul-Mickey opens O’Connell’s to women) and they are playing poker together.
Good ending. Beautiful, intricate story, full of life, love, tragedy, survival, growth.