Asian Window

Moira Hodgson reviews “In the Kitchen,” by Monica Ali (Scribner). In the Wall Street Journal:

Monica Ali’s best-selling first novel, “Brick Lane,” was about an immigrant family from Bangladesh living in east London. With “In the Kitchen,” Ms. Ali again focuses on multicultural Britain, this time setting her story in a hotel restaurant.

The classic work on the subject is, of course, George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” with its account of the author’s grueling experience as a dishwasher in the George V hotel in the 1930s. Much of the action of Ms. Ali’s novel takes place in the kitchen of a London hotel that was once as grand as the George V. The Imperial in Piccadilly, we’re told, was built in 1878 by a “flinty-eyed and wealthily-whiskered” industrialist and in its prime was visited by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward and the Aga Khan.

Now, after half a century of decline, the hotel has been taken over by an international corporation that’s trying to get it back into shape. The people who work in the Imperial’s kitchen are members of a struggling underclass: immigrants and refugees from all over the world, including India, Africa, Somalia, Eastern Europe, Russia and the Philippines. With its faded splendor and multinational staff, the hotel is a metaphor for the confusion and social disintegration of contemporary Britain, of the new versus the old order. More:

The Hotel

Monica Ali at Prospect:

I spent a year researching In the Kitchen. Most of this time was spent reading a mountain of non-fiction books about the restaurant and hotel trades, and delving firsthand into those worlds. I spent time in five large London hotels, on the understanding that I would not identify them. I talked to everyone from managers to receptionists, but mainly I hung out in the kitchens chatting to staff and absorbing the atmosphere.

As one of my characters observes, hotel kitchens resemble UN assemblies: a rich source of diverse stories. They are also places that function under intense pressure, creating an ideal crucible for dramatic confrontation. To a certain extent, the same things could be said of any commercial kitchen, but once I had entered the hotel world I knew no other kitchen would do. The setting provided more scope to bring in a wider range of characters and to examine ideas, tensions and conflicts in a larger part of society. Indeed, I had so much material that for a while it was difficult to know where to begin.

Then I discovered a news clipping I had kept for a couple of years. It reported the death of a Ukrainian porter, whose naked body had been found in the bowels of the Café Royal in Piccadilly during the 2003 Christmas holidays. Unbeknown to his employers, the porter, an engineer from the Ukraine who was working illegally to support his daughters back home, had been living in the boiler room to save money. (He had been sleeping naked, it seems, due to the extreme heat, and died by accident after a fall.) This tragic tale, which said so much about how within the confines of one building such different worlds are inhabited, loosely inspired the death at the opening of the novel that haunts the protagonist throughout. More:

[Photo of Monica Ali by Robin Matthews / Simon & Schuster]

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