MONICA ALI,
ALENTEJO BLUE, DOUBLEDAY

Monica Ali enjoyed considerable success with her debut, Brick Lane, which rode high on the current interest in discovering more about the private life of recent British immigrants – specifically those from Bangladesh. Publishers looking for the next Zadie Smith hyped it to the skies, and many found the story of Nazneen, brought to live in Tower Hamlets as the dependent wife of a fat, ugly man, from whom she eventually escapes in a torrid love affair to be, in the words of one critic, “written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime.” Others found the complete opposite.

For her second novel, Monica Ali has chosen a very different setting and cast, for Alentejo Blue is about the lives of people living around the Portuguese village of Mamarrosa. This may seem a smart move for an author who is clearly interested in describing alienation and integration. Portugal, too, is relatively unexplored fictional territory despite having a diverse mix of English people working and playing there – conveniently split, as on an aeroplane, between the low-rent golf-playing South and the posh, port-making North. With no significant literature of its own, and only Paula Rego to support its international position in the arts, its best claim to fame is probably the china featuring the remarkable deep blue that gives the novel its title.

Ali tells her story through a number of different viewpoints, ranging not only from Portuguese and British but between third and first person. We begin with Joao, an old peasant who finds the body of his former friend Rui hanging in the woods. He cuts him down, and remembers how they first met as rebels against the dictatorship of Salazar. Rui was a Communist; captured and tortured, he survived, moved to Mamarrosa and had three children who have all gone to work abroad. Now, despair has proved too much for him.

It is a good beginning, and the contrast with the appalling Potts family, consisting of a drunken and possibly criminal father, slovenly mother, feral son and sex-mad daughter is also promising. These are all-too-familiar British immigrants tasting love in a warm climate, whose immoderate behaviour shocks local people even as their young take advantage of it. Stanton, a morose British bachelor, takes pity on the boy Jay, but is soon having sex with both mother and daughter. Meanwhile, fat Vasco dreams of America and his dead wife, Lili, while consuming too many of his own wares, and pretty Teresa is determined to give her virginity to the boy she loves before going to London as an au pair. A young engaged couple find their relationship falls apart while an unhappy middle-aged woman makes the village the subject of her latest fantasy. Lives touch each other without ever insecting.

Ali’s prose is carefully observant, if teetering on the pedestrian kerb of cliché. It would sound perfectly respectable when read aloud at literary festivals, but fails to step into the highway of real literature. She is compassionately interested in showing people’s internal life, whether this is of the dangerously bored boy Jay, who tries to start a fire “like a science experiment” in between biking through the cork woods, or Teresa’s discomfort and humiliation after finding her newly-engaged best friend and partner have come along to the holiday house owned by a couple from Lisbon, where she intends to have sex for the first time:

“A butterfly, powder blue, lit briefly on the neck of her bottle, on the table top, on the back of the chair, tilting and turning like a heroine making a dizzy escape. Teresa watched it dip and flutter across the room to the bar where it wheeled away from the line of old bent backs and shaved necks and dropped suddenly to the floor.
“ Listen, Teresa addressed it silently, I know how you feel.”

Ali’s sympathy for those unwittingly trapped by circumstance was one of the features which made Brick Lane admired, but sympathy is not enough. To be made to not only know but care about her unremarkable characters much more is needed: insight, passion, style, wit. As it is, you find yourself yawning over Ruby Pott’s teenaged pregnancy, and her lost or aborted baby; or fat Vasco, or Mamarrosa itself. These are like people glimpsed while on holiday, and there is no discernable plot to keep one interested in them. It is particularly dismaying to find that one of the central characters is an English writer, because that suggests that the author was simply unable to imagine an adult being engaged in any other kind of work. Everything about Alentejo Blue suggests a novel dashed off too quickly, or perhaps resuscitated from a bottom drawer to fulfil a contract. It will do much to support the many readers who complained that they had encountered not Brick Lane but a brick wall. The vision of Alentejo blue remains as remote for the author as for her characters.

The Literary Review, June 2006