etc.

This is a big, juicy, satisfying novel that I’m glad I took my time with (for the most part although I read the last half in 3 hours, in time for the book club meeting, which has to be the overriding downside to book clubs: the deadlines). It is about three families whose lives are intertwined against the backdrop of multicultural London, a city that is often intolerant of the multiculturalism that defines it. There’s Archie Jones, an ineffectual, dimwitted yes-man, who quite contentedly skims over the surface of life, and his best friend (and “mentor”, he admits in the end) Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant who tortures himself over what it means to be a “good Muslim” in the West and raise his sons to also be good Muslims while attempting to filter out Western Corruption. It’s all tongue-in-cheek of course, because by all accounts Samad is anything but a good Muslim, hence all the self-loathing and mental anguish. And all this loathing and anguish is exacerbated by the irony of his first son’s atheism and almost complete embrace of English culture (ironic because he was the one of the two sons who was sent back to the Homeland for soul redemption) and his second son’s abandonment to an extremist religious group. And then there are the Chalfens, a very clever, very white family whose internal relationships are no less dysfunctional than the Jones’ or the Iqbals’ even though the parents purport to have the happiest marriage they know of and boast an open and progressive relationship with their four boys. This is a busy novel with as many different voices as there are political and moral opinions and points of view, which are all thrown into one pot and stirred around furiously. The results are tragic, hilarious, miraculous and never dull.