[Film-maker/writer Julian Samuel has made a 4-hour documentary on Orientalism and has published a novel, Passage to Lahore.]
Zadie Smith's White Teeth hammers the pus-filled world of the politically correct and the religious. She gives all the major religions and their thinner derivations a jolly good hiding, especially: The Church of Animal Rights Activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Islam -- albeit for the latter she understandably reserves her mockery to oblique pot-shots.
Smith's publishers have pressed Salman Rushdie's seal of approval right smack in the middle of the cover: “An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious . . . it has bite.” The words 'Salman Rushdie,' in red ink, are set in light cream-colored box. Smith must have cringed at this parentalism. Father Rushdie helps to sell the book. Smith has composed beautifully-argued pages on the Bradford Moslems who shower the rose petals of tolerance on copies of The Satanic Verses.
White Teeth sails through generations of multi-racial Britons as they arrive, leave, come back, clash, merge and intercourse with working class whites, spatially disoriented hippies, scooter nerds, white middle-class English school kids with their well-syntaxed parental parents, and a luminary scientist who copyrights the genetic structure of a mouse. And there is a hilarious, well-orchestrated section on why young black women get their curly black hair straightened; politically advanced lesbians laugh in the background.
Smith does not sustain entangled narratives well. Rather, her strength lies in replicating the English spoken in London. With formal expertise she places wide-ranging vernaculars right beside the Queen's -- well more or less somfing like the Queen's. Early Jamaican-English rhymes beside clunky white working-class English; Modern Jamaican-English breathes against historical Jamaican-English with metallic urbanity. Two British Jamaican men prattle in old time Jamaican-English while sitting in O'Connell's pub; the pub owner prattling in an tragicomic working-class Queen's which is more of a knife blade than a ductile tongue.
Sadly, this novel-of-lesser-ideas moves with little consequential cultural or political depth. (Iain Pears', An Instance of the Finger Post}, is a more challenging novel of historical, political, scientific ideas, with substantial characters set in calculated, sinuous plots. But then Pears may not have Smith's comic ability to use Modern 'black' English with similar dexterity.)
Smith's sprawling narratives about fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers and throbbing adolescent tensions are not set in challenging frameworks. She doesn't 'flash it,' as Jamaican-English might have it. One wishes that she had threshed out a more jarring story path. Why? Because Smith is recording cultural life on this European island as it traverses its most radical cultural transformation to date, Roman conquest of 55 BC notwithstanding. The UK of White Teeth was not visible a mere twenty or thirty years ago. Imagine a Fatwa at the time of Strawberry Fields; imagine Gerry and the Pace Makers singing in Urdu (now a national language); much easier to imagine someone copyrighting a mouse's genes at the time of Steptoe and Son, though it was still out of the reach of science back then.
The subject matter of her book somehow warrants, or tends to ask for a hitherto unseen narrative structure. But Smith -- perhaps sensibly, for so much of experimentalism is deathly stupid and insipidly formal -- sticks to conventional narrative form, with loving nods to Joyce, the lapsed Catholic. One smooth, formally conservative chapter flows beautifully into another. London emerges out of the Roman fog anew, turgid with postcolonial hybridity and rampant with religious superstitions and corollary violence.
Many writers in Europe's most prestigious island, and on the continental mainland itself, have, with tremendous creativity already confronted the question of complexly-coded, multi-racial societies. Amin Maalouf's masterpiece, Leon L'African' (1986) comes to mind as well as, Mehdi Charef's Le Thé au Harem d`Archimède, (1985).
White Teeth refines the tradition of unearthing what would have without doubt been passed over by the British publishing industry and its indulgent nombrilist narratives. There is nothing new or shocking about White Teeth, but what a pleasure it is to experience Zadie Smith's mastery of European tongues flapping in front of the Queen Mom copyright mouse squeaking and all. Dying to see the film.
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Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans is written in a prose that falls like fine rain on a sunny day, glistening on the Lake District, the moor, Shanghai, on Japanese soldiers. The story captures English society of the 30s. Ishiguro is good at setting tactical conversations amidst large, festive, bourgeois balls, chandelier and glitter.
The splintered historical narrative has a faint hint of Excavating The Political. References to English Fabians with their righteous fight against the injection of Indian opium into China, and a young detective looking for his parents are the main themes.
Ishiguro's characters should have been better integrated into the Chinese history; this would have deepened our understanding of the political use of opium. When We Were Orphans tells us more about the individual as a personality, rather than the individual moving through-and-in-history. However, despite this imbalance, the book is a lovely, almost satisfactory read.
* * * *
Martin Amis' Experience bursts with terrific multi-layered writing and literally millions of half-page long footnotes which prove his passionate love and knowledge of English literature, but the book is as inane as a Tony Blair smile. Why not compose a book consisting entirely of footnotes? See what I mean about experimental dullness?
Experience is English navel gazing. After getting as far as page 175, I returned to White Teeth and listened to the many tongues around Kilburn, Willesden, and Primrose Hill.
THE END