Marriage Material, by Sathnam Sanghera – review

Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his home town (now a city) Wolverhampton, with its shabby factories and shimmering new gurdwaras — ‘Wolverhampton, the arse of the Black Country, in itself the bumcrack of the West Midlands, in itself the backside of Britain’.

In Marriage Material he returns to the same rich and little explored multicultural terrain, in a novel that ingeniously ‘shoplifts’ (his word) characters and elements of plot from Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. His tale is also the tale of two sisters, one a loyal stay-at-home and one an ambitious runaway who makes off with a travelling salesman, and Bennett readers will enjoy spotting parallels as they follow the fates of Kamaljit  Bains (Constance) and Surinder Bains (Sophia)— allusions which extend as far as Surinder’s horrid pampered little dog, here not a French poodle but a King Charles spaniel called Jessie, a creature which illustrates all too well why proper Sikh Punjabi families don’t really go for pets.

The girls, like the Baines daughters of Burslem, are brought up over the shop, and struggle against convention, gossip, superstition, the caste system and family expectation. As in the parent novel, we observe through them the social changes which affect their community from the 1960s to the present day, for we are brought brutally up to date by the unfolding plot — we move from Enoch Powell and an era of Sikh civic protest and participation (represented by the revolt against the Wolverhampton Transport Committee’s turban ban) to a new kind of backlash racism engendered by the sex crimes committed against vulnerable teenage girls in northern cities by Asian men.

This dangerous material is handled with a darkly comic lightness of touch, and an impassively detached ironic tone that may owe something to Bennett — like Bennett, Sanghera makes good use of local newspaper cuttings, letters to the editor, and contemporary fashion magazine material, which gives an unobtrusively authentic period flavour to each passing phase.