Youth And Uncouth Expat Adventures

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 3, 2006

Reviewed by Andrew Riemer. Andrew Riemer is the Herald's chief book reviewer.

Having made her name dissecting immigrant life in London, a Bangladeshi-born author turns her gaze on the Brits abroad.

Alentejo Blue

By Monica Ali

Doubleday, 297pp, $32.95

ANYONE HOPING THAT Monica Ali's second book would be a re-run of the spectacularly successful Brick Lane will be disappointed. There is a great temptation nowadays for writers such as Ali, who was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England, to let themselves be typecast. I am sure she could have written what many - perhaps even her publishers - might have expected of her: another tale of Asian immigrant life in contemporary Britain. Instead, she has turned her back on Tower Hamlets in the East End of London to explore an entirely different landscape.

Alentejo Blue is set in an impoverished southern province of Portugal - the "blue" of the title seems to refer to a shade of the colour unique to the region - that has remained all but untouched by the waves of holidaymakers and tourists that have been washing over the Iberian peninsula for decades.

The first chapter in particular is a tour de force. An old man, Joao, sits by the body of his lifelong friend Rui, whom he found hanging from a branch of a 200-year-old cork tree. As Joao's thoughts float from the present to the experiences (some of them deeply secret) that he shared with Rui, Ali gives her readers a deft, impressionistic lesson in the history of Portugal during the 20th century.

Only relatively recently has the nation - still the poorest in Western Europe - begun to recover from the repression and stagnation of the 40-year rule of the dictator Salazar that began in 1928. Not as notorious as Franco, the strongman next door, Salazar also persecuted socialists, communists and other undesirables and forged strong links with a hidebound, ultraconservative church hierarchy. It was for those reasons that the waggish journalist Bernard Levin, writing in the early 1960s, dubbed Portugal Britain's oldest and dirtiest ally.

Ali sketches the horrors of the Salazar years with a light but telling touch as Joao contemplates his friend's corpse. Her writing is assured and all the more moving and disturbing for its restraint. But at heart Alentejo Blue is concerned with the present, not the past.

The inhabitants of Mamarrosa, the small town where most of the novel is set, are not much intent on politics and for many of them (as Joao remarks at one point) Portugal's dark past is no more than a dim memory at best. They worry about the future and about their prospects, particularly whether the return of Marco Alfonso Rodrigues, who is reputed to have made a vast fortune abroad, will bring prosperity to the town in the shape of hotels, resorts and shopping malls. Some - like Teresa, a young woman caught between the demands of traditional life and the blandishments of the contemporary world - dream of escape to London or Paris or New York.

The contrast between the placid or at least stoic elderly inhabitants of Mamarrosa and the restless young, who show themselves willing to break the iron rules of custom, tradition and religious precept, generates many fine pages.

Nevertheless, Ali places her main emphasis on a gaggle of Britons: expatriates, drop-outs and tourists whose paths occasionally cross. Most vivid among these is a family named Potts. They have left England because of some vague, undisclosed indiscretion on the part of the paterfamilias, "China" to his friends, a gross creature with lax ethical and hygiene standards. His wife, Chrissie, has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with a writer named Harry Stanton, an unpleasant character, who has come to Mamarrosa to find a refuge where he might finish his magnum opus on William Blake.

Their teenage daughter Ruby - she of the clumsy, old-fashioned hearing-aid - manages to get herself pregnant in a country where abortions remain outlawed. Jay, Ruby's younger brother, is well on the way to going native, as his parents would say.

This - essentially the central strand of the novel - is surrounded by the stories of other transient Britons, all of whom, one way or another, come to experience the impact of the landscape and the people of Alentejo. Eileen, a middle-aged Englishwoman married to an opinionated though well-meaning bore, succumbs to the romantic urge to spend the rest of her days in Mamarrosa. Huw and Sophie, young London sophisticates on a pre-wedding holiday, discover that their relationship is found wanting as they travel the countryside, inspecting ghoulish chapels constructed from human bones and skulls, and observing the customs of the country.

Ali has a sharp eye for her characters' tics and quirks and a splendid ear for dialogue, at least where her English speakers are concerned. She runs into difficulties, of course, when rendering her Portuguese characters' speech. On the whole she manages well enough, but, inevitably I suppose, these people tend to sound a bit too much like Londoners; this is especially true of younger people, such as Teresa, her lovers and her friends.

The last chapter draws together the novel's rather loose strands (somewhat in the manner of As You Like It) at an outdoor party where most conflicts are resolved - sometimes less, rather than more satisfactorily. There, as once or twice earlier in the book, I felt certain misgivings.

Ali's villagers and townsfolk carry on in a quaintly comical fashion that brought to mind the "funny little foreigners" mindset of old British films and of the BBC's celebrated April Fool hoax about Italy's spaghetti harvest - not to forget Manuel from Barcelona. Occasionally, Ali is rather patronising towards her Portuguese characters.

None of that should hinder readers from enjoying this bright, frequently thoughtful novel in which the author of Brick Lane demonstrates an old but often forgotten truth: it's how well you write, not what you write about, that matters most. One day, perhaps, Ali will return to the subject matter of her first, highly acclaimed book. In the meantime, her new novel reveals the scope of her considerable talent.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home