Monica Ali: from Brick Lane to Kensington

We had been discussing her husband, Simon Torrance, a management consultant, and I asked Monica Ali whether they had met at Oxford, where she read PPP. “No, he went to the other one,” she says, and I nod, “… Loughborough Poly”, at which we both scream with laughter.

This joke was unexpectedly playful, apart from in the obvious way (Torrance did, in fact, go to Cambridge, Jesus College). Until this point we had been having an agreeable and interesting time — sitting around the table in her sun-filled kitchen, sipping milky coffee; her children’s new puppy, Poppy, snoozing on the sofa — but it was all a tiny bit earnest.

Later, when we exchange e-mails, I mention that she can come across this way in interviews, although her “amused” and “sparkling eyes” are often commented on, as though she is enjoying a private joke. This was also an observation made of Diana, Princess of Wales, on whom Ali’s new novel, Untold Story, is based. “Well spotted,” she wrote back, “Though, to be fair to previous interviewers and reviewers, I am earnest. I wouldn’t say it’s the whole picture, but I think it’s OK. The only pitfall is if you start believing your own press!”

Advance reaction to the book has been mixed and I have a strong sense that she has prepared a line of defence, as a pre-emptive strike, against suggestions that she has cashed in on the royal wedding.

Ali delivered the first draft of her manuscript last July, predating the announcement of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding by several months. “My first thought was, ‘Oooh, is it going to look like insensitive timing?’ Actually, as it’s turned out, it has been the most enormous stroke of luck. Diana had been off the front pages for quite some time, and when William put his mother’s ring on Kate Middleton’s finger it brought her back — as he knew full well it would — into people’s minds. ‘What would she have thought of that action?’ ‘What would she think of the wedding?’”

So will you be watching the royal wedding on television? “Yeh-ugh,” she says, with a teenage upward inflection. “Definitely. Of course. I’ll be watching Kate Middleton and her dress and all that … One of our guilty pleasures, whether we admit it or not, is watching the international fame show of first wives’ clubs — you know, she’ll be joining the likes of Carla Bruni and Michelle Obama, and she’ll come through with flying colours.”

A writer in The New York Times had commented on Diana being a “curious” subject for Ali to write about, which I had interpreted as meaning that to write about her you had to be a Sloane (or Tina Brown), which Ali is amused by. Her reading of it was that the subject might not be considered serious enough for her (an opinion one of her friends has expressed).

“In which case, I would say, ‘Anything can be a serious subject’. And to suggest that Diana, who was a major public figure, is de facto not a serious subject seems odd to me. And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it is totally unserious — I don’t think it is — but say it was, well, that would be OK, too. Part of the role of the writer is to entertain. If, one day of the week, I go off and stuff envelopes for PEN and the next day I go off and have my nails done, well, I think the suggestion that one thing cancels out the other is bizarre. I mean they’re all parts of your identity. I don’t read The Gulag Archipelago every night. Sometimes I read a thriller.SPONSOREDThe UK’s opening up all overThe people fooling facial recognition software

“And I’m a British woman. I grew up with Diana, like all other British women. Not everyone was fascinated by her, but I was deeply interested in her, so I chose to write about her. Issues of identity have been my subject matter, whether it’s about a Portuguese village or a chef in the North of England or Brick Lane or a princess. It’s not the only thing I write about, but it is an abiding theme with me — and nothing’s going to stop me writing about what the hell I like.”

After reading Untold Story, I could not help comparing it to Brick Lane, her first novel, which is so rich in its characters and storyline, so convincing on every level, with an extraordinarily assured and original voice. It brims with life and one of the ways in which it is so appealing is the constant shifts in tone from unshowy pathos to laugh-aloud humour.

In our encounter, once Ali relaxes — despite all the practice, she is still an anxious interviewee — the jokes keep coming. When I ask her what attracted her to her husband, she says: “I’m going to say the same thing that everybody else says — sense of humour,” and then, “I should have just said ‘his body’!” Then a deep, almost manly laugh. “Well, that, too, quite frankly.” Is he cheeky? “He is cheeky, yeah,” she says, “and he doesn’t take any crap from me — although he doesn’t undercut me.”

Her late English maternal grandmother, Bess, who sounds like an Alan Bennett creation, was a mistress of the undercut. Bess’s daughter, Joyce, had fled the civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh with a great deal of pluck and persistence, and arrived in Manchester, two small children in tow and penniless.

Joyce had to leave behind her Bengali husband, Hatem, an academic (many of whose colleagues had been killed), and it was nine months, after a secret dash through India, before he could join his family in England. “My grandfather, who met us at the station, paid the guard,” Ali has written. “My grandmother was waiting at home [and] was very concerned, she said, about how my mother intended to pay back the fare.”

When I repeat this story, Ali says: “I was very fond of my grandmother, but there were difficult times and a long period of no communication.” Those formidable northern matriarchs (though her grandma doesn’t sound all that maternal) are often unwittingly amusing, with their dour commentaries on other people’s lack of standards. She must have her own funny stories about her late grandmother? “Oh lots. I remember she had this ‘frenemy’ — a friend and an enemy at the same time. No, it’s not my invention, I think it’s a little girl thing.

“Anyway, she thought this friend of hers was a little bit common. So she liked to be a little bit superior to her, and wasting money was always a sign of being common in my grandmother’s view because it was showing off and unbecoming and undignified. This friend died a few years before my grandmother did and after she went to the funeral she reported back that it had been a lovely service, but she couldn’t help adding, ‘oak coffin … brass handles. Imagine that! What a waste!’” Another gust of throaty laughter. “You know, even unto the grave.”

Untold Story is a way, it could be said, of bringing Diana back from the grave. It is one writer’s answer to the question that many of us may have asked: how would her life have panned out if she were still alive today? If the Alma Tunnel tragedy had not happened, Diana would have been 50 this year.

Lydia Snaresbrook, the heroine of Ali’s novel, is a fictional princess (based heavily on the Princess of Wales) who, believing that the Establishment is preparing to assassinate her, stages her death with the assistance of her loyal (and terminally ill) personal secretary, Lawrence Arthur Seymour Standing. She has dramatic plastic surgery in Brazil to transform her features, dyes her hair black and masks her dazzling blue eyes behind brown contact lenses.

Ten years after her death, she has settled in a small community in Middle America, drawn to the place, in part, because of its name — Kensington. All is well — or as well as it can be for a mother who has left her beloved sons behind — until the chance arrival of a member of the paparazzi, “Grabber” Grabowski, also drawn to the name of the town, who had been her most assiduous stalker-snapper, at which point the novel turns into a thriller.

It had started life as an idea for a short story: “My thought from time to time over the years was that if Diana hadn’t died, what would she have been like in her forties? So that was the germ.”

In the summer of 2009 Ali took a stack of books on holiday to Portugal, where she and her husband have a second home, “and when I started reading up about her in earnest I became completely riveted”.

What particularly intrigued her was the fantasy that the Princess had of living an unexceptional life. “What I decided to do was write about a fictional princess who — in a reversal of the traditional fairytale — leaves her riches behind and goes off and does live this ordinary life.”

So did the Princess talk about this desire to be ordinary a lot? “It was something she speculated about with friends sometimes, and she made vague plans for her and Hasnat Khan [the heart surgeon with whom she had a two-year relationship — the love of her life as she described him — before he ended it] to go and live abroad, try to get a job in Australia, I think it was, but it could never be anything more than an idle fantasy.

“She would go and play house with some of her lovers. So with Hasnat Khan she would go and do his ironing at his flat. But what I was interested in, really, was taking a fictional princess out of one context and dropping her down in another and exploring questions of identity through that.”

One of the difficulties of the novel , I say, is that there is so much that we know about the Princess that Lydia is almost trapped or stillborn in Ali’s extensive research. So as a reader, instead of getting involved in the development of the character on her journey — as we do, successfully, in Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, the heroine of which, Delia Grinstead, walks out of her family life and reinvents herself somewhere far away — we are constantly measuring the fictional princess against the real one.

I ask Ali whether she believes that if Diana could have moved somewhere where she could disappear, would she have had the strength of character to be as self-sufficient as Lydia? Could she really have found contentment in a simple life, away from the glare of the public?

“Well, there are two angles to that question, if I can disentangle it,” she smiles. “I want to be quite clear in saying that there are a lot of similarities with Diana’s situation and her background — I’ve clearly drawn on that, there’d be no point denying it — but there are differences, both large and small. So it’s a fictional princess that draws on some of the situation of Diana.

“The second part of the question is — forget the novel — if you’re thinking about Diana as a person, is there any possibility that she could have been that self-sufficient and uncraving?

“One of the things that struck me when I was doing all my reading was that she had this dazzling public life, full of adoration — well, some people hated her too — but a largely adoring public, glittering events, and then she’d go home to Kensington Palace, quite often on her own, with a dinner tray balanced on her knees, watching EastEnders.

“So that was a big disjuncture. Her childhood was quite lonely: her mother left when Diana was 6 years old, her father married a classic wicked stepmother. There were many contradictions in her life. She was lonely in her marriage for a long time.But she was an incredibly strong woman.

“How women get labelled by strong is ‘wilful’. She’s wilful, manipulative, all those negative female terms. She was under a huge amount of pressure and she could have just put up and shut up, but that’s exactly what she didn’t do. As she said, she wouldn’t go quietly — she just went her own way.”

Ali has a lot of writing projects on the go at the moment. A short story about a middle-aged woman whose life went into a downward spiral when she woke up speaking in a French accent ( a rare medical condition; Ali read about it in a newspaper). She is researching a novel set in the overseas aid industry and is toying with the idea of doing an MSc in development studies at the LSE next year.

Last year she spent six months in the United States teaching creative writing at Columbia University, and so enjoyed it that she is thinking of teaching in this country. And she is also writing the screenplay of Untold Story and fancies Cate Blanchett in the role of Lydia.

Before I go, she kindly shows me her study — a pristine place, with a white carpet and a tidy desk, rows of her books, some in languages that she doesn’t recognise. There’s a poster of “Keep Calm and Carry On”, which she thinks should come down now that it seems to be everywhere, and an old black and white photograph of Calcutta. I say that the descriptions of her short childhood in Bangladesh (she was only 3½ when she left) sound so vivid: the family sleeping fully clothed on the balcony, poised for flight, a roll of banknotes tucked into her father’s socks, the mango tree with its long branches, which would offer them an escape into the next-door orphanage.

One day, and it can’t be left for too long, she intends to return there with her father, who is in his seventies and not in the best of health. In the meantime, she is busily writing down his village stories: “He’s got so many of them! They’re not for publication — just to keep for my children because he won’t be around for ever.”

I had asked her what touched her most in life and she had said: “That’s a hard question . . . the sound of my children’s laughter [Felix, 12, and 10-year-old Shumi, short for Shumitra, which, charmingly, means “big smile”]. It’s the most wonderful sound in the world. They bounce into our bedroom every morning and it’s glorious.”

Later she wrote back: “I’ve had some more thoughts about that final question. Talking about my grandmother (who could be a bit sharp and snobbish, as I said) reminded me of one of the things that has touched me most in my life: the rapprochement that did eventually take place between her and my father. It started off so badly. But they ended up having a high regard for each other. I think that says a lot about both of them, that they could put aside their differences.”

Now that would make a good story.

The Times