IT BEGINS WITH GREAT PROMISE. Mon-ica Ali sets her second novel after Brick Lane far away—in the yet-to-be-discov-ered- by-tourists village of Mamarossa in Portu-gal— where we meet an 84-year-old peasant encountering death: “At first he thought it was a scarecrow.” As Joao comes outside his home in “the tired morning light to relieve his bladder, blessing as always the old Judas tree”, he sees the dark shape in the woods, which turns out to be his best friend hanging from a tree.As Ali tells us, Joao and Rui were seventeen and hungry when they first met, both in search of work—and love, which, sigh, unlike Broke-back Mountain, will stay unrequited. But then the worst possible thing happens. Just when you crave to know more about Joao and Rui’s past, Ali appears to lose interest in them, stray-ing on to chronicle the lives of people not half as interesting—barring a handful like the over-the- edge Potts family—as J & R.Over the next eight chapters, we are forced to meet a brood. From English writer Stanton who has fled to Mamarossa to overcome a lack of inspiration; the crazy English family of four, the Potts, who escape from trouble and land in some more (they make for a great ensemble: drunken father, straying, insect-bitten wife, lost-in-the-woods son and pregnant daugh-ter); local cafe-owner Vasco who goes into a Hamletian dilemma over cake (to eat or not to eat) to mourn his dead American wife; the youth of the village who yearn to leave home like beautiful Teresa and so forth.But with so many people in the fray, it’s a fact that while Ali is good with some, she is un-fair with others. For instance, we can safely in-vest in Stanton and the Potts family, even though like everyone else, they get only a chap-ter each, but none of the locals.We know from her debut novel that Ali’s a keen observer and there’s ample evidence of it in this too, not least when she brings pretty Ma-marossa to life, albeit in touristy details. As one of the characters passing through puts it: “So we stay, as we are, and watch the shadows lengthen and smell the evening loaves being baked and feel the sun, slipping low, blushing over our necks like the first taste of wine.”At times, Ali stretches the frame to fit pretty words in. When Teresa decides to lose her vir-ginity before she leaves for England to be an au pair, we find her wearing black slingbacks and a white cotton dress with blue flowers that matched the paint that framed the door. Alen-tejo blue. “There she was,” writes Ali with flour-ish, “in a picture, in a moment, setting out for the rest of her life.”Like Brick Lane, she also makes most of her characters dwell at length about life—and its absurdities. For instance, one of the reasons why young Teresa wants to get out is to avoid the life meted out to her mother: “It was terrible that her mother was so young. There were, per-haps, 40 years more of this, of endless busyness and torpor, of inadmissible defeat.” It doesn’t become better when locals tell us that there are people in the village whose “biggest decision has been whether to paint the doorframe yel-low or blue”.But where do you go from Brick Lane? There’s perhaps a reason why Ali, whose debut novel about a Bangladeshi immigrant finding her way in the world in London met with great suc-cess, chooses to wander away from Brick Lane territory for her second novel. But she doesn’t manage to convince us. There are too many characters, their lives are too little. Not enough to want us to go back to it, again and again, like great fiction should make us.
