Monica Ali
ALENTEJO BLUE
304pp. Doubleday. £14.99.
0 385 60486 6
The first problem comes with the title. If Monica Ali’s new novel is to be a word-of-mouth success, that troublesome “j” has to be overcome. Alentejo is the inland region in the south of Portugal where the action takes place. Once we have learned how to say it (“Alentayzo”, with a soft “z”), we can ask: what are we doing here? The majority of the characters in the village of Mamarrosa are discontented with their lot. Some of the natives long to get out, such as Teresa, who imagines a new life as an au pair in London; those who have arrived on a voyage of self-discovery from Northern Europe, mostly England, are on the point of losing their sense of direction altogether. As one incomer says of another: “She was dreaming and she thought she was just waking up”.
Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane (2003), was a peculiar phenomenon: a first outing destined to be a runaway success even before its release. It would require a wilful blindness not to view the prepublication excitement partly through the screen of Ali’s identity as a half-Bangladeshi woman in a country constantly anxious about “diversity”, but she avoided efforts to cast her as the next this or that, and the novel transcended its publicity. It is safe to assume that Ali’s publishers, not to mention expectant readers, would have welcomed a second outing to the East End of London, with similar narrative confidence and freshness of observation. Instead, Ali has attempted to do something bolder. In the process, she has turned her subject matter inside out: she is still writing about rootlessness, but whereas Brick Lane revealed a closed world in the heart of England, with no English characters of substance, here Ali turns to a deracinated assembly of refugees abroad, scrabbling to inject meaning into their intoxicated, over-technologized, under-cultured lives, hoodwinked by the notion that sunshine and leisure form a raison d’être by themselves.
There are roughly ten separate narrative strands in Alentejo Blue which never gain grounding in a dominant story. While the comings and goings of the bored inhabitants of Mamarrosa intersect occasionally, they do so without building momentum. The excitements of life are basic. Harry Stanton is an unlikeable writer at work on a second novel, about William Blake. (Readers in search of clues to Ali’s change of mode will study the remark, “He was twenty-eight when his first novel was published. Paradigms in Eight Tongues. How much easier it was to write then, thinking he knew about life”.) Harry is taking sexual advantage of Chrissie, a washed-out former junkie and hippy, and of her daughter Ruby. Surely there will be hell to pay from China, the husband and father? No, he’s too smashed to care. Teresa, who longs for the streets Chrissie has left behind, and her puerile suitors, Antonio and Vicente, could have stepped out of the Brazilian soap opera to which she and her mother are devoted. The book opens with João, a weathered old pig farmer, nursing the hanged body of Rui, his lifelong friend and comrade from the days of opposing Salazar. Their struggle resulted in a Revolution – which brought the sale of land for golf courses, and an invasion of Northern dreamers.
Ali’s clean and vivid prose, while aiming for a Mediterranean pitch of its own, lands somewhere between declarative Hemingway and general translatorese:
“Standing on the log that Rui had kicked away João took his penknife and began to cut the rope. He put his free arm across Rui’s chest and up beneath his armpit, felt the weight begin to shift as the fibres sprang apart beneath the blade. The almond blossom was early this year. The tomatoes too would come early and turn a quick, deceiving red. They would not taste of anything. João took Rui’s crooked hand in his own and thought: these are the things that I know. It was time to put the broad beans in.”
The reader waits for opposites to collide and make sparks, but the author’s concerns are with interiors – the dominant media are inner monologue and cloudy, misdirected conversation – and with style.
Two-thirds of the way in, the narrative voice switches from third-person to first, perhaps for a good reason. Yet another new set of characters is introduced, with little connection to those already half-drunk in the afternoon glare. Like Brick Lane, which concluded with street riots, Alentejo Blue ends with a Forsterian “lump”, in this case a village fiesta. There is also the return of a mystery man, flagged in the opening chapter; but by the end the design of the novel is too spread out to be resolved by such old-fashioned devices.
Despite the low-intensity action and the absence of all but the ghost of a cohering story, Alentejo Blue is a readable book, with pleasing touches on almost every page: “the fountain that leapt and dazzled, and revelled in its own unnecessary life”; “she poked at the puncture mark on her heel to provoke the peculiar satisfaction of a small, anticipated pain”; “the people who made a virtue of looking at you frankly were the ones with something to hide”. Similar touches throughout confirm that Monica Ali is a patient observer of the world and its mysteries, but the mystery here is why a proven storyteller has written a story from which the interest appears to have been deliberately extracted.
