Marriage Material
by Sathnam Sanghera
Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera, first published in 2013, is a reworking of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. The protagonists of Bennett’s 1908 novel are two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines. In their youth, the siblings work in their mother’s drapery shop, but then Sophia elopes with a travelling salesman, while Constance marries Mr Povey who works in her mother’s shop. The two are reunited in old age.
Sanghera essentially borrows the general drift of the story, along with some of the more granular plot details, and refashions them as the gently comic saga of a British-Asian family running a corner shop in the West Midlands, with the Baines sisters replaced by Surinder and Kamaljit, daughters of an immigrant Sikh family. The novel alternates between the present (early 2010s), as represented and recounted in the first person by Arjan, the prodigal son of the owners of “Baines Stores”, and the “historical” account of Surinder and Kamaljits coming of age. The stories intertwine at the end.
The contemporary segments of the novel are presented in the knowing, comedic voice of Arjan, a character who would not have been out of place in a Nick Hornby novel. The funny, self-parodic narration elicits smiles and chuckles, but the book also has more earnest undercurrents about the challenges of the immigrant experience in the UK. This element comes to the fore in the segments about Surinder and Kamaljit, and their respective histories.
Ultimately,
Marriage Material is a feel-good novel, in which Sanghera even manages to
slip in some elements of the mystery and thriller genre before cruising towards
an optimistic ending. Overall, an entertaining but thoughtful read
by the author of Empireland.
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