Love Marriage

Monica Ali

(Virago, 3 Feb 2022)

Review by Suzanne Harrington

You get the feeling that everyone has been waiting expectantly for Monica Ali to deliver another Brick Lane-style banger, following the meteoric trail of her Booker Prize-shortlisted 2003 debut. Instead, she took us sideways into unexpected places – to Portugal in her second novel, Alentejo Blue (2006), and to Kensington, a small fictional town in America, for Untold Story (2011), involving a high profile member of the royal family faking her own death to escape the deadly celebrity of her life. What if Princess Diana had not died in a car crash, but had instead dyed her hair, flattened her vowels, and gone to live in suburban obscurity ‘across the pond’ in the USA? Critics slightly scratched their heads.

In Love Marriage, Ali’s first novel in a decade, we are apparently back on more familiar ground – the south London of the Ghorami family and the north London of the Sangster family. Yasmin Ghorami and Joe Sangster are twenty-something junior doctors at the fictional St Barnabas hospital. They are in love and plan to marry. A love marriage, just like Yasmin’s parents – although she still doesn’t quite know the full story, other than in Bengal, Ma came from money and Baba did not. Yasmin is proud of how her parents’ love prevailed against all odds, although they are curiously tight-lipped about the details. 

We meet the two families as they are about to meet each other for the first time – and Yasmin’s toes are curling in embarrassment before the Ghoramis reach the elegant Primrose Hill home of her future mother-in-law. Her father, a GP, drives a Fiat Multipla, ‘the ugliest car ever made, the Elephant Man of motoring’; Ma dresses like an explosion in a charity shop; they arrive with enough Tupperware boxes of Ma’s homemade pakora to feed the entire street. Joe reassures Yasmin that his mother, Harriet, will love this: ‘Your parents are authentic enough to give her an orgasm’.

Harriet Sangster, an iconic feminist intellectual, is famous for her books, her salons, her unfiltered opinions, and an infamous image of her bush. Arif, Yasmin’s ‘boneless, insolent’ younger brother, takes great delight in all of this. Yasmin is terrified that Harriet will bring the topic of sex into the ‘chaste and cardamom-scented’ Ghorami household, where frank and open discussion is carefully avoided and father and daughter communicate by discussing medical case studies, and that her parents, with their lack of worldliness, will embarrass her in front of Harriet. 

It’s all a perfect set up for a family comedy with romantic overtones and characters straight out of central casting. Except – as is the way with Monica Ali – the book sets off in a different direction, confounding expectation, and spends its five hundred pages exploring the psychology of relationships, both intimate and familial, through the unfolding stories of the characters. Nobody is as they seem. The only genuine love marriage comes from a less obvious source. There is a character with an addiction, but the choice of substance is not obvious. Nor, aside from a few workplace villains, are there any real bad guys. Just humans – funny, exasperating, flawed.

The focal character is Yasmin’s mother, who is initially presented through the lens of her daughter as docile and content, a mother first and woman second:

‘She’d been happy enough….. A chat over the garden gate. Cooking. A trip to Poundland. A rummage through the clothes racks at the British Heart Foundation shop. More cooking. Prayers.  Family. Knitting, crochet, pickling, upholstery, gardening, baking, half-baked home improvement projects. And more prayers. Ma was always busy. And she’d been happy enough until Harriet decided to interfere.’ 

Yasmin blames Harriet for turning Ma into a feminist: ‘Oh, no,’ said Ma, beaming. ‘Already I am feminist.’ Baba’s character has echoes of Chanu in Brick Lane – disapproving of excitement, arranging his whisky miniatures in alphabetical order, and demanding that his son get a proper job instead of making YouTube films about Islamophobia. Yet underneath the buttoned-up brown suit lies hurt. 

Underneath all of the characters’ facades lies hurt of some kind, apart from Yasmin, the self-identified dutiful daughter, whose carefully mapped out life increasingly veers off road. This off-roading is what humanises each of the characters from sitcom standards into something more intriguing and relatable. Set aside time and sofa, and dive in.

https://www.virago.co.uk/titles/monica-ali/love-marriage/9780349015477/