Alentejo Blue
by Monica Ali
Black Swan, HK$132
Monica Ali's second novel little resembles Brick Lane, but it owes much to her Man Booker Prize-nominated work: the book not only earned her critical and commercial success but also enough money to buy a farmhouse in Portugal's Alentejo region, whose imagery inspired Alentejo Blue. An episodic novel made up of disparate characters and storylines, it reads like a bag of loosely linked tales unnaturally girded at one end. Locals and expats arrive, leave and return, but not in a way that endears readers to any of them. Opening the book is an old Portuguese peasant called Joao, who stumbles across the body of his friend and former lover Rui hanging from a cork tree. The suicide underscores the political and private angst of Rui, an opponent of the Salazar dictatorship, and demonstrates what Ali does so well: build contours into personalities and set the scene. But then she rushes into another story, that of Stanton, an English writer not being very productive because he's distracted by booze, the heat and a white-trash family who fill their days in a dope-filled haze. To tie up the straggly bits Ali plots the return of Alentejo's prodigal son, allowing all to converge for what promises to be a memorable ending. Unfortunately, it's not worth the wait.