In The Kitchen
by Monica Ali
Black Swan pp553
ISBN: 978-0-552-77486-4

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset – I really didn’t enjoy reading Alentejo Blue, Monica Ali’s second novel. I found it slow-paced, so loosely put together, that I kept ruffling through the pages to see how longer the novel would last. Critics weren’t impressed either – The Washington Post called it “Unrelentingly depressing”.

Maybe it was the second album syndrome. But then, any novel that would follow Ms Ali’s amazing 2003 debut was bound to be doomed because Brick Lane was an exceptional tour de force. Set among the Bangladeshi community of London’s East End, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Brick Lane was a celebration of humanity in all its shades. Every sentence quivered, every word lunged at the retina with a hustle and bustle of energy, every comma waited in perfect comic timing.

With In the Kitchen, Ms Ali is back on form, returning to the Brick Lane themes of immigration, national identity and family. The novel is set in the hotel kitchen of the Imperial Hotel in Piccadilly. As Anthony Bourdain masterfully describes in Kitchen Confidential and in Medium Raw and as director Stephen Frears showed in his film Dirty Pretty Things, kitchens are as transient as airports. They are a veritable Tower of Babel where all the nationalities of the world gather around a roaring burner. Personifying the kitchen, Ms Ali writes, “If the Imperial were a person…you would say here is someone who does not know who she is.”

It is in this setting that the underdogs gather to eke out a living, by hook or by crook. And everyone has a story, the one thing that they kept with them when they escaped their homeland.

Gabriel Lightfoot, the executive chef of the Imperial, rules this “United Nations task force”. At 42, Gabriel is gunning for change. After years slaving away for others, he is determined to open his own restaurant thanks to two backers. Making hay while the sun is shining, he also proposes to his red-haired, jazz singer girlfriend, Charlie.

But death, as usually happens, comes along to ruin Gabriel’s plans. First, a Ukrainian porter, Yuri, is found dead in the basement of the Imperial kitchen. Then his sister calls him to break the news that his father, a retired mill-worker with whom Gabriel has a difficult relationship, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And he can feel a small, bald patch on his head – the cruellest intimation of mortality for any man – growing.

Then there is Lena. Trafficked to England for prostitution and linked to the dead porter, Gabriel offers to help her find her brother. She moves in and they start an affair.

Gabriel’s world soon takes a tumble. His investors start getting cold feet, Charlie discovers his affair with Lena and walks out, and when he visits his father, he learns the uncomfortable truth about his dead mother.

Riding the waves of shows like Top Chef and The F Word, kitchens have become a fascinating place for us. Ms Ali fattens our fascination through brilliantly written kitchen scenes. When in the Imperial Hotel kitchen, Ms Ali is at her best, churning out beautiful prose like a literary cook. The first scene is particularly brilliant. During dinner service, “Knives wheeled and pans slammed… burners hissed and flared… the white plates marched… the chefs shouted orders and insults and jokes, swerving and bending, performing the modern dance of cuisine.” You can almost smell it.

But even outside the kitchen, Ms Ali is on form – her characterisations are not straightforward and she builds up her characters, even secondary ones, not directly through their physical features but indirectly through the way they interact with the world and with humanity. When writing about Ivan, the Eastern European grill man at the Imperial, she writes how his consonants jangle together “like loose change”. Through such skilled characterisation, Ms Ali manages to show that behind every stereotype and every faceless immigrant worker, there is a real individual. But then, it is not just national identity that Ms Ali is interested in, but our core, what makes us individuals. Watching his grandmother struggling with dementia, Gabriel asks “Where is Nana? I mean, physically she’s in her chair. But where’s the person, the Nana that we knew?”

Ms Ali also manages to combine action and reflection – the kitchen is the novel’s rumbling, tumbling nerve centre, and when it’s cooking, the novel is searingly hot. Outside the kitchen, the novel is a reasoned discussion on national identity, family and loyalty.

In the Kitchen unveils the immigrant world spiked with tragedy that lies hidden behind the walls of London’s establishments. But it is not just London – the capital is just the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg. “London was all belly, its looping intestinal streets constantly at work, digesting, absorbing, excreting, fuelling and refuelling, shaping the contours of the land,” Ms Ali writes.

In the Kitchen is one meal of a book. Ms Ali’s writing is not a French sauce, one you reduce, but an Indian one, which you build up. In the Kitchen dishes out a leisurely starter, a challenging main course and a perfect dessert. Eat on.

• For Mr Borg, a book is everyone’s best friend.

The review copy of this title is the reviewer’s own.