Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is, in fact, the best book that has ever been written about Brick Lane. No doubt it would have won lots of prizes if the author had had a slightly different name. It is about a community, but it is based around two girls who work in a telephone and computer place off Cannon Street Road – the E-Z Call phone shop.
Your first book doesn’t actually get as far as India. Foxy-T, by Tony White.
This is, in fact, the best book that has ever been written about Brick Lane. No doubt it would have won lots of prizes if the author had had a slightly different name. Anyway, it is about a community really, but it is based around two girls who work in a telephone and computer place off Cannon Street Road, the E-Z Call phone shop. There are all these dubious characters coming in who are out of young offenders institutes or whatever, people from the Bangladeshi community, and it’s really about the progress of these two girls, and the whole book is written in Bangladeshi idiom. It takes a while to get into, but then you do get into it and it’s an amazing tour de force.
But he’s not Bangladeshi?
As you can imagine, no. Tony White! It was very well reviewed when it came out. I don’t know how he knows so much about the community and I’m not an expert on the dialect, but to the extent to which I do know about these things, I’d say it was pretty authentic. I think you can often learn more from a novel than you can from a factual book.
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Roy Moxham is the author of Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me, A Brief History of Tea, an updated edition of Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire, The Great Hedge of India, and The Freelander. A former tea planter in Nyasaland and later Malawi, he spent 13 years in Eastern Africa before becoming Senior Conservator of the Senate House Library, University of London.
