Tales of the city

Multi-cultural make-up: Brick lane

11 April 2012

It is a writer's worst nightmare to open a newspaper, or walk into a bookshop, and see there reviewed, or displayed, the very book you have been working on for the past two years, written by someone else. This is what happened to me, or in a moment of panic I thought what had happened, when I read about Monica Ali's Brick Lane a few months ago. I was - am still - writing a novel about Brick Lane. Its provisional title was Brick Lane. As might be imagined, I felt sick.

As I read more about Monica Ali's book, however, I stopped feeling sick and though, after buying it, the novel sat for a couple of weeks unread on my bedside table, when I did start reading it I was soon carried away by the story and characters. This was partly because Brick Lane is impossible to dislike and partly because our books are so different.

Hers is the tale of a Bangladeshi family over the past 20 years. Mine is a fictional tour of the history of Brick Lane, written in a mosaic of connected stories. Only a small part of my novel concerns Bangladeshis (though I do, as Monica Ali does, have a character involved with heroin called Tariq).

But I was also freed to enjoy her book by the realisation that the coincidence of our two Brick Lane novels is not, it seems to me, a coincidence. It is the kind of synchronicity that often happens with art. Two, or more, writers come to the same story at the same time because it is a story crying out to be told. A story that needs to be told. And this is the case, I think, with Brick Lane - not only Brick Lane, but other parts of London: Brixton, Tottenham, Zadie Smith's Willesden.

In Dickens's time the London novel was the great city novel. Dickens's London was dense and rich with colour, people, noise, smells. All of life existed here. But then something happened. In the 20th century the great city novel moved to Joyce's Dublin, Bellow's Chicago - even Welsh's Edinburgh.

London fiction became small-scale, suburban. The most notable piece of London literature of the last century was TS Eliot's The Waste Land, and even that, with its images of commuters flowing over London Bridge, its concern with rats, has something small-minded and suburban about it.

More recently, Martin Amis's London Fields, published in 1989, was a deliberate attempt to write a great London novel. But for all its stylistic brilliance - its efforts to capture a modern London language - London Fields strains too hard, with its apocalyptic vision, its landscape of gargoyles, for a Dickensian grandeur that it does not quite reach.

William Boyd's Armadillo (1998) is also a London novel, replete with sweeping descriptions of the city, and what is interesting here is that Boyd makes his protagonist the son of Romanian immigrants.

A decade ago I spent two years working in a prison as a writer-in-residence and I was struck then by how many of the stories I was given to read were by men trying to make sense of growing up between two cultures. The prison was near London and it was filled with young men of West Indian, Turkish, Pakistani and Colombian origin.

Their writing was mostly not very good - these were men who had lost the plot of their own lives - though it was always lively, the language colourful and expressive. One of the men, Rocky Carr, did have a novel, Brixton Bwoy, published by Fourth Estate.

Monica Ali's Brick Lane, like Zadie Smith's White Teeth, has the same impulsions as the writing I read in the prison. A need to make sense of immigrant experience. To tell the stories of people who have come to London from other parts of the world, other worlds. How they adapt, change, fight with their parents, their children, cling to their old ways, take on ours.

These novels tell us what is going on behind the eyes of people we see on the Tube, the brown-faced men with moustaches, the women in headscarves. But they also look at London, at us, through fresh eyes: through them we see our city anew. By we, of course, I mean mostly the descendants of earlier migrants.

London has always been a city of immigrants and migrants. In the 16th and 17th centuries more people died in London than were born here, so the city literally depended on internal migrants who were known as "foreigners", and immigrants, or "strangers".

These waves of migrants, and their stories, were part of what drew me - the grandson of East European Jewish immigrants - to want to write about Brick Lane. The street has always been one of the main channels for migration into London, first for Flemish brickmakers, then Huguenots, then the Irish, Jews, and now the Bangladeshis of Monica Ali's novel.

It is worth remembering that Dickens's London was peopled with migrants. In Oliver Twist, some of which takes place around Brick Lane, Fagin is a Jew, and Oliver a runaway to London. The diminishment of the London novel coincided with a period of low migration into London. The Alien Act was passed in 1905. For the next 50 years there was more movement out, towards the suburbs, than in.

The London novel came to seem pale and flimsy compared to the urban American novel. But this may be changing. In her introduction to a new collection of American short stories - The Burned Children of America - Zadie Smith writes how American-fiction has lost "the exuberant possibilities of Bellow's America", is more "muted... uncertain, sad".

These exuberant possibilities are exactly what is present in the novels of Smith herself, and now Ali. Where Amis strained, Smith and Ali seem effortlessly to have found a Dickensian scale. Brick Lane may be an intimate, delicately-observed story, about a Bangladeshi woman who watches the world through the window of her council flat. But it also, almost without one noticing, incorporates famine in Bangladesh, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, September 11.

How good Zadie Smith and Monica Ali are is almost irrelevant beyond that they are good enough to do what they have done, which is to reclaim London as the setting for the epic city novel. London now has more languages than any other city in the world, more peoples.

Before long, it is to be hoped, we will read the first Somali London novel, the first Kosovan London novel, the first London novel written by someone, or the child of someone, who is today swirling dirty water across windscreens on the Marylebone Road.

Jeremy Gavron's The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award, is published in paperback in August by Scribner. His next novel, A Tour of Brick Lane, is due in 2005.

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