Book review: In The Kitchen, by Monica Ali

Published on Thursday 7 May 2009 16:02

Doubleday, 432pp, £17.99 Review by SUSAN MANSFIELD

THE EATING-OUT REVOLUTION has been one of the biggest transformations in British culture in the last two decades. Once a nation who ate out infrequently, in indifferent restaurants, we turned into a nation of high-spending gourmands. So what better lens through which to dissect 21st century consumer-culture than the kitchen of a large hotel?

Gabriel Lightfoot, the protagonist of Monica Ali's ambitious third novel, is the executive chef at the Imperial, a Victorian pile in Central London, presiding over a sweltering workshouse in the building's bowels, "part prison, part lunatic asylum, part community hall". But the suspicious death of a Ukrainian kitchen porter sparks off a series of events which threaten the kitchen's equilibrium, and Lightfoot's own.

There is a death in the first few pages, but this is no murder mystery. The business of Yuri's death is quickly solved. Too quickly, perhaps, for Lightfoot, who is haunted by the sense that a human life can count for so little. As he becomes obsessed, he starts to dig deeper into the darker side of the service industry, past the chefs (legal migrants) and the porters (illegals), down into the invisible world of sex workers and bonded slaves.

Lightfoot begins an affair with Lena, an indifferent, ghost-like Belarussian, which costs him his relationship with girlfriend Charlie. It seems symptomatic of other tensions in his life: juggling the figures for the restaurant he hopes to open under the eye of the hotel manager; neglecting his dying father; avoiding the truth about his dead mother; obsessing about the shadowy life of the reptilian restaurant manager. As they mount, the kitchen becomes a pressure cooker in which he could lose himself.

Ali is on top form when she captures the kitchen in full flow, efficiency running on an undercurrent of violence. Her cameos are masterful: Oona, the shuffling matronly sous chef; Ivan, the scar-faced grill chef presiding over his "ring of fire"; stoic Nikolai, who refuses promotion to keep chopping veg like a peasant in the gulag; the Viagra- obsessed French pastry chef Albert.

And the kitchen is a microcosm of London, to which she makes a welcome return after her second novel, Alentejo Blue, set in Portugal. London, Lightfoot concludes, is not the brains or the heart of the country but the belly, "digesting, absorbing, excreting, fuelling and refuelling". It is roiling, invigorating to the strong, but as Lightfoot's internal world fragments, his sense of the city also dissolves into disorientating fragments.

Ali is a clever, careful writer, a rich observer of detail, as she demonstrated in Brick Lane. Here, she adds intricate set pieces of the kind developed in Alentejo Blue, interweaving text and subtext. The result is an elegant novel which moves slowly, even when the heat is on, lacking the drive which made Brick Lane unputdownable.

Lightfoot is an oddly unsympathetic protagonist, frequently passive, by his own admission "spineless". That said, his crisis is a 21st-century one: the collapse of the fulfilment promised by career, the absence of the happiness to which one believes one is entitled.

There is no faulting this book's ambition. Ali widens her scope from the Bangladeshi immigrants in Brick Lane to the migrant experience at large, from Liberian refugees to Moldovan sex workers. In this complex, fluid and often hidden world, the most precious commodity is a story, but when stories can be bought and sold as easily as false passports, whom can one trust? In one generation, the country of Lightfoot's father, a northern mill worker, has changed. The metaphor of warp and weft, a close-knit manufacture-based society, has given way to the multicultural melting pot of the kitchen in which isolated individuals must struggle to survive.

There are times when it feels as if Ali was struggling to make Lightfoot care as much about this subject as she does. He is thrust into a situation too big for him, with his weak will and his good intentions. But that is surely the point. This is a book about what it means to live in the 21st century, what it means to be good in this world of moral and political quicksand. In that respect, we can look at Lightfoot and see something of ourselves.