Brick Lane is Monica Ali's 2003 novel named after the London street of the same name. It follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London at the age of 18 to marry an older man, Chanu. They live in London Borough of Tower Hamlets. At first, Nazneen's English only consists of sorry and thank you; the novel explores her life and adaptations in the community, as well as the character of Chanu, and their larger ethnic community. An additional narrative strand covers the experiences of Nazneen's sister, Hasina, through the device of her correspondence.[1]
Upon release, Brick Lane was generally well-received among the British press[2] and was listed as a bestseller by The Daily Telegraph for two weeks.[3][4]
The Observer described Chanu 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."[5]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."[6]
Brick Lane was well received by critics in the United Kingdom and the United States[citation needed], and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.[7]
However, the novel provoked controversy within the Bangladeshi community in Britain. Some groups[who?] thought Ali had negatively portrayed people from the Sylhet Division, as they constitute the majority of the Bangladeshi immigrants living in the Brick Lane community.[citation needed]
When production was underway in 2006, some of the Bangladeshi community opposed Ruby Films' intention to film parts of the novel in the Brick Lane area. They formed the Campaign Against Monica Ali's Film Brick Lane. There were also demonstrations against the filming of Brick Lane by the Bangladeshi community in Brick Lane due to the films negative and stereotyped portrayal of the area and the Bangladeshi community more broadly, and as sociologist Claire Alexander argues, due to it ignoring the areas rich, layered, and subaltern histories in favour of viewing the area through a essentialist, racialised, and prejudiced lens.[8]
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 Sylhetis of Brick Lane did not recognise themselves. BengaliMuslims 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.[9]
Greer criticised Monica Ali's "lack of authenticity", as she had never spent much time in the Brick Lane community, and no longer spoke the Bengali language fluently. The writer Salman Rushdie criticised Greer for getting involved, saying that her statements were "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but ... not unexpected."[9]
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