Brick Lane is 2003 novel by Monica Ali, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Nazneen, a young woman from Bangladesh who is married off to an older man and obliged to live with him in the Brick Lane area of East London.

This book caused controversy when it was published, some in the Tower Hamlets Bangladeshi community feeling it portrayed them in a negative light. Personally I thought the negative light shone much wider than that community. Perhaps the approach of the book is summarised in the small details of twee knickknacks that Nazneen finds herself dusting in her London flat. These figurines include lions and tigers, which have a wider significance, as the names of rival groups – Lion Hearts, right wing British nationalists, and Bengal Tigers, a Bangladeshi Islamic group formed to oppose them. Lions and Tigers actually require each other to justify their belligerent existence. And the book quietly presents them both as pointless clay figures, together on a shelf.

This lion/tiger symbolism is the sort of thing that Nazneen’s husband Chanu would appreciate. And he would have liked all the stuff about fate and free will in the book. Chanu was my favourite character really, a bumptious man, proud of his reading of classic English literature. Lion and Tiger slogans annoy him equally, not that all the subtleties of his high-end reading get him very far. He takes a considered essay on race relations along to a Bengal Tiger meeting, but is not brave enough to present it.

There is no simple answer in this book, though it is perhaps telling that Chanu is possibly the most successful character, not perfect by any means, not a hero, but somehow more sympathetic than any lion or tiger. So personally I don’t think this is a book to be offended by. The character I most identify with is hapless Chanu, who like me thinks he is a cut above cheap political posturing, preferring to sit quietly with the subtleties of fancy reading. But I’m not offended by the portrayal of a passive, sometimes completely useless, bookish fellow. It’s true – I wouldn’t be keen on reading out my race relations essay at a rowdy meeting either. Chanu is a character of the middle ground, in a book which is even handed in bravely casting a neutral eye over lives that usually polarise themselves into one side or another.