Subject: 3 Mini Book Reviews by Julian Samuel
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:36:20 -0700


3 Mini Book Reviews by Julian Samuel

*

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, Published by the Penguin Group, Toronto, 2000
$24.99, 462 pages

*

When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Alfred A. Knoff Canada, Toronto, 2000
$34.95, 313 pages

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Experience, by Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knoff Canada, Toronto, 2000
$35.95, 406 pages

*

Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' punctures 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  -- which
understandably, she is petrified to mock comprehensively. Happily, however,
she takes oblique pot-shots throughout.

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 on
a light cream-coloured 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 in a now multi-racial Britain 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.
There is a hilarious, well-orchestrated section on why young black women get
their curly black hair straightened; politically advanced lesbians laughing
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 diverse vernaculars right beside the Queen's -- well, err...
moreorless 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, and 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 the 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 uglily formal -- sticks to
conventional narrative form, 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.

*

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
30's. 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.
Despite this imbalance, the book is a lovely, almost satisfactory read.

*

Martin Amis' 'Experience' bursts with terrific multi-layered writing and
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.

*

Film-maker and writer Julian Samuel, has made a four-hour documentary on
Orientalism and has published a novel, Passage to Lahore (De Lahore à
Montréal). You may contact
him at jjsamuel-AT-vif.com

www.cgocable.net/~naveg8r
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V7N1/ARTS/arts.html
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V7N1/ARTS/samuel1.html




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