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Monica Ali @ LBF25 | 13th<\/sup> March 2025 At all of the talks and events at this year’s London Book Fair there was an abiding sense that the wider world is in a state of disequilibrium, to put it mildly. Chris Power (A Lonely Man<\/em>, 2021) put words to what many of us were thinking in his first question to Monica Ali. We’re all pulled in so many directions by the news cycle at the moment, he said. It can all feel rather overwhelming. What place does fiction have in this chaos?<\/p>\n Ali confesses that this question\u00a0\u2013 or versions of it \u2013\u00a0has often bothered her. For years she has struggled with the fear that books may be only of limited value. Each book has its own writing challenges that must be overcome, she says, but beyond that she has often wondered: what is the point of making up stories? This has only intensified as time has gone on. Now the very world order seems to be being remade in front of our eyes, and even journalism can\u2019t seem to keep up with the pace of change. Yes, novels offer diversion, distraction, entertainment\u00a0\u2013\u00a0but it doesn’t always seem like enough. Listening to her, it\u2019s clear that although she has surely been asked questions like this before, Ali is in earnest, and thinking hard about how to answer. In fact, she then turns the question back on her questioner. After jokily pretending to deflect by invoking his host privilege, Power says that he has often looked to other writers whose work has given him solace. He is suspicious of the idea that novels can somehow ‘train’ empathy, but gives the example of Natasha Rostova in War and Peace<\/em>, where Tolstoy is writing about Russian identity and history but has also created a character for the ages that transcends those things.<\/p>\n Ali agrees. She considers that one of the problems is that when notions such as the importance of ideas or the power of words are thrown around, they can come to feel overfamiliar. And, of course, writers are programmed to resist clich\u00e9. She mentions the Polish writer Ryszard Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski, who believed very strongly in the literature of political experience, and travelling extensively to find momentous political events to write about. Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski claimed he’d gone to witness history in the making, and when he looked around for all the other writers, they weren’t there. They were back at home writing the same old stories about a boy, a girl, and love. For a long time, she says, this quote has cowed me, but now I think he’s actually setting up a false dichotomy. For one thing, if we’ve been telling stories like those for such a long time it suggests that we find value in them, and shouldn’t ignore them. Also, if we look carefully enough at the big political stories, we tend to find at the heart of them some version of those old stories: boy, girl, love, and pain. The domestic and the political are not, in fact, separate spheres.<\/p>\n Moving the conversation towards Ali’s work, Power asks about her feted debut, Brick Lane <\/em>(2003). What did it feel like to be in the middle of such a flurry of attention, success, and praise? Horrible, jokes Ali. No, she says, it was very exciting and all far more than I had ever expected. She was very grateful, although it did take her away from her children for a while. It seemed to happen very fast\u00a0\u2013 she sent a few chapters to a friend, who forwarded them on to a publisher, and they were already in the process of wanting to purchase the book before they insisted that she really should get herself a literary agent. Not, she acknowledges, the way things are ‘supposed’ to work.<\/p>\n After some more specific questions about Ali’s books, Power observes that she never seems to write the same book twice. Why is that? Ali admits it might be easier and more profitable in some respects to write the same book multiple times, but says that for her if she’s not experiencing great discomfort at certain points in the writing process, she’s doing something wrong. Probably, she reflects, this isn’t the most efficient way to build a readership. But, in fact, she does feel that she’s doing a similar job within each text, just approaching new material. For example, while they are outwardly very different, the protagonists of Brick Lane <\/em>and Untold Story <\/em>are similar in various ways in terms of their humanity and lived experience. Do you think, Power asks, that non-white authors are more prone to getting accused of being ‘out of their lane’? That has been the case, Ali says, but hopes that things have changed in the last ten years or so. Or maybe, she adds, people just don\u2019t say it out loud any more.<\/p>\n An audience question concerns female writers\u00a0\u2013 what advice does Ali have for those starting out now, with respect to social media and scrutiny? Ali replies that she does not do any social media, mostly because she doesn\u2019t want to be distracted. She would rather spend her time reading, researching, and writing. There’s a notion that writers must<\/em> be active on social media now, but she believes that if you have a story to tell and the right way of telling it, the publisher can and will do it for you. She knows this to be true, because they do it for her.<\/p>\n Another audience question, close to the end of the talk, seems to bring us back to the discussion of the role of literature in an unstable world, and if it can make a difference. What, the questioner asks, would you like your readers to know about South Asian women? There is, Ali says, still a certain amount of exotification at work. She wants readers to understand their full humanity. She would like to say \u2013 and to some extent she believes it\u00a0\u2013 that things are changing. But then again, just a few years ago a survey of writers’ advance payments showed there were still huge discrepancies and inequalities along gender and racial lines. Things, perhaps, have got better in many ways, and there is more representation. But there is a danger of getting complacent. We can focus too much on individual success stories and lose sight of the bigger picture\u00a0\u2013 and things can and do swing back the other way.<\/p>\n Reviewed by Joseph Hunter<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Monica Ali @ LBF25 | 13th March 2025Reviewed by Joseph Hunter At all of the talks and events at this year’s London Book Fair there was an abiding sense that the wider world is in a state of disequilibrium, to put it mildly. Chris Power (A Lonely Man, 2021) put words to what many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,431],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Reviewed by Joseph Hunter<\/strong><\/p>\n