British author Monica Ali recently published her third novel, In the Kitchen. (John Foley/Opale/Simon & Schuster Canada) Monica Ali is no stranger to pressure-cooker situations, and in her latest work, the British writer immerses readers in the high-stakes environment of a hotel kitchen. Reality-TV cook-offs like Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen (starring Gordon Ramsay) have nothing on the fictional world of chef Gabriel Lightfoot, the protagonist of her new novel, In the Kitchen. The book opens with the mysterious death of a Russian-born porter, and unspools to expose a seedy world of human trafficking, back-room deals and prostitution rings — all of which take place while Lightfoot’s staff feverishly prepare for each day’s meal service.
'Issues of identity run through the book at different levels. We’ve become quite obsessed with “What is British identity?” over the last couple years.'
—Author Monica Ali
In the Kitchen contains some evocative descriptions of custards and bloody meat, but Ali is interested in social commentary, not gourmand porn. The novel is ripe with complex debates about the changing face of Britain — familiar territory for Ali. Her first novel, Brick Lane, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2003 and stirred up a fair share of controversy. The book followed the journey of a young woman who enters into an arranged marriage with a self-important, toad-like fellow twice her age in London’s Bangladeshi community. Brick Lane angered some factions of that community, who perceived the book as negative and classist in its depiction of individuals from Bangladesh’s Sylheti region.
Ali was irked that her fiction had become fodder for debate, but she took the fracas in stride. The writer spoke out against Britain’s Racial and Religious Hatred Act, a parliamentary bill intended to curb hate crimes. Ali sat down with CBC News for a discussion about British identity, colonial guilt and why we’re so obsessed with kitchens.
Q: It seems like there’s a collective fascination with kitchen exposés. Were you aware of the extent of this fascination when you started writing this book?
A: Oh yeah! We’ve got this celebrity chef obsession with Gordon Ramsay and the like.
(Simon & Schuster Canada) Q: Where do you think that comes from?
A: Well, it’s something Gabriel and [his love interest] Charlie talk about: Where does this food-porn culture come from, when by and large people are only doing microwave cooking? It wasn’t true when Gabriel started his training. He thinks about it again when he sees his father cooking for [Gabriel’s grandmother], breaking up the lumps in the gravy so her false teeth won’t have to do too much work, and he thinks maybe it’s not about filling mouths so much as it’s about filling a hole in our lives. That there’s some vacuum there in modern life that we have to fill in some way, and it’s a harkening back to — maybe it was a mythical time anyway, but — the family hearth, the cooking, the solidity that implies.
You know, I’d watched Gordon Ramsay on the TV and so on, and while there are some times when it gets gritty and he swears and sweats and all that, it’s still sanitized and glossy. I was interested to know what really goes on below the stairs.
Q: The characters in In the Kitchen seem reluctant to tell their stories. Why did you make them so reticent?
A: Well, I spent a year doing research in kitchens. I spent several years before that thinking about it, but there was a year doing intensive research, in London, in a big hotel. I’d interview people in the kitchen — or rather, I didn’t interview people in the kitchen; I hung out in the kitchen. You have to be there until people start to trust you enough to open up. If you talk to a manager, you can sit down with a pen and a notebook and ask questions. But as you go down the hierarchy, as you go down the ladder, you have to work in a different way and allow them time. These aren’t necessarily stories that are easy to tell.
And that was my experience being in a kitchen — they’re workplaces. They’re high-pressure places. You have to get on with the job at hand. For Gabriel, when the book starts, he doesn’t really want to know the background of his staff. If you might have to fire someone in the future, you don’t necessarily want to know anything traumatic about their past. It’s a business you’re running. Other people’s stories can be hugely enriching, but they can also be overwhelming and exhausting.
Q: I can imagine that as a writer, you encounter some pressure to speak on behalf of South Asian communities. Do you think there’s a compulsion in British society to promote the voices of immigrant writers out of a sense of colonial guilt?
A: Yeah, I think there absolutely is.
Q: And that’s frustrating for you.
A: I don’t have any comeback for it, really, because anything I say will be seen as sour grapes. I can just work. But it is, you’re right … I think, you know, it’s very difficult to get the work taken for the work. If it had a different [author] name on the cover, it would be read in a completely different way.
The 2003 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novelists, from left: Monica Ali, DBC Pierre, Clare Morrall, Margaret Atwood and Damon Galgut. (Stephen Hird/Reuters) Q: In both Brick Lane and your second book, Alentejo Blue, you explored the domestic sphere. Here, you’re immersed in the public sphere, but you explore the domestic tensions that exist within that space. It seems like those traditional values are being transplanted into the work environment.
A: It’s also about the way that community is shifting and evolving, particularly in a big metropolis, as compared to, say, a mill town like Lancashire. I grew up in an old mill town. I went back and did research, not just there but in other small towns around there. I talked particularly to old people, older white people, about the changes they’d seen in their lifetimes. And their thoughts are reflected in [Gabe’s father] Ted and particularly through the character of [Gabe’s grandmother] Nana. So, Nana will grumble about the Eid Day parade, but she’ll also reminisce about the days when they had their Mother’s Union marches and their own religious festivals, and when there used to be a church on every street corner, not a mosque.
I think it can be painful to see another community have what has perhaps been lost in your own. I think it’s made more painful by the way that it’s difficult to talk about it without being accused of being stuck in the past or racist, even. And Gabe is appalled by what he sees as his father’s and grandmother’s racism, and he thinks back to when he was a kid and thinks, "Well, I’m not like that anymore; I’ve moved on." But Gabe’s father has longstanding friendships with Pakistanis, for instance, with whom he’s worked, and while Gabe may have all the right attitudes, he’s not really engaged with anyone, at least in the beginning. It’s interesting terrain to explore.
Q: Is the character Gabe your way of exploring what constitutes Britishness?
A: Issues of identity run through the book at different levels. There’s Gabe’s own personal identity, and British identity. It’s about complexity, really. We’ve become quite obsessed with “What is British identity?” over the last couple years, particularly with the introduction of a new citizenship test. So now in the U.K., if you want to become a British citizen, you have to take a test. And the test is based on this book that the government published, called Life in the UK, which is a marvellous piece of fiction! This happened about four years ago now, and immediately when it was published, these online tests sprung up — you know, Could You Pass The Test? I remember taking one. I did fine on the history questions — what’s the Magna Carta, that sort of thing — but other things I had no idea about. Like, PG — what does “PG” stand for? I thought it was our favourite brand of tea, PG Tips, but apparently not. It’s Parental Guidance, from our film classification system. And there was another one that was marvellous: What should you do if you spill someone’s pint in the pub? I’m not making this up! I got it right: You offer to buy them a new one. But I was tempted to opt for another answer, which was: Prepare for a fight in the carpark.
Q: Especially during football season.
A: [Laughs.] Yes! Anyway, the point is that once you start having politicians saying, “These are our core values, this is what we stand for and believe in,” you can’t be sure that there isn’t a bit of a vacuum there, that we don’t know anymore. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, that’s a good and liberating thing in lots of ways, but it’s also a destabilizing thing for lots of people. It’s not a matter of saying good or bad, black or white; it’s a matter of exploring those differences and tensions and so on. For instance, in the work sphere, the values Gabe’s father held at work — of commitment and long-term loyalty and goals — were in fact the same values he took into the home. Whereas for Gabe and for all of us now, the modern workplace isn’t like that anymore.
Q: You talk about the joy you get from writing characters and fiction, but you were schooled in political and economic theory and philosophy. Do you have any impulse to do more socio-political criticism?
A: A reader asked me that at a festival and I didn’t have a very good answer. I just said, “Well, I write fiction because I like telling the stories and I’m drawn to creating characters.” And then I went away and thought of it and tried to figure out what is the reason. I thought about it in the context of a novel I’d read by Tom Piazza called City of Refuge, which is based in New Orleans around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It follows the fortunes of two families. I’d read some of Piazza’s non-fiction work about Katrina, which is also very good. But it was really the novel that brought home to me what that disaster meant to the individuals involved, and the government’s response or non-response to that. Non-fiction has a very essential role in uncovering lies. And fiction also has an essential role, which is uncovering the truth, the emotional truth of situations. And that, I think, is why I’m drawn to fiction. I think that’s what fiction can do best.
In The Kitchen is published by Simon and Schuster and is in stores now.
Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
