It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door.
The first sign that all might not be well below stairs at the Piccadilly Imperial, built in 1878 by a Victorian industrialist and once visited by Charlie Chaplin, comes when Yuri, the Ukrainian night-porter, is found dead in the basement store-room. While the coroner diagnoses a drunken fall — much to everybody’s relief — there are other discoveries to set aside the contused and naked body and the two black binliners containing his worldly goods. Chief among them is ex-waitress Lena, a prostituted waif from Moldova, whom Gabe ends up installing in his flat and, somewhat to his surprise — she is utterly charmless — falling in love with. A close second is the slimy restaurant manager’s people-trafficking scam. Meanwhile, from the northern fastness of Blantwistle, comes news of Lightfoot senior’s mortal illness. Love life a mess, professional future uncertain, family skeletons capering through his dreams, Gabe starts to fall apart.
Like Ali’s best-selling debut, Brick Lane — there is no geographical resemblance — In the Kitchen is a novel about modern urban tribes, diaspora and mono-cultural smash. In a work environment where ‘every corner of the earth was represented’, Gabe and fuddled teenage trainee Damian are the kitchen’s only home-grown staff. The old folk up in Blantwistle lament the end of ‘Britishness’ and a multiculturalism that sets myriad translations of council leaflets against insufficient library books. What might be called the panorama tendency in Ali’s work disables it in several ways, most obviously in her characters’ gratuitous habit of reflecting on the state we’re in. But neither Gabe’s father, discussing nationality tests, or his political chum Fairweather — as clumsily named as the hotel — on the economy, or even Gabe himself talking youth cults with his nephew and niece carry very much conviction. Like some of the dialogue (‘I suppose that everything is for sale’) they are lashed to the narrative rather than growing organically from it.
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