Gabriel Lightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern England mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of anContinue
Gabriel Lightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern England mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. Despite the pressures, all his hard work looks set to pay off.
Until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death -- but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.
Elsewhere, Gabriel faces other complications. His father is dying of cancer, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, and the restaurant manager appears to be running an illegal business under Gabe's nose.
Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows -- and the future he thought he wanted.
Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali's fiction. She is compared to Dickens and called one of three British novelists who are "the voice of a generation" by Time magazine. In the Kitchen is utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer.
A Dirge of a Novel
I enjoyed Ali's first novel, Brick Lane, and picked this one up as it appeared to be in a similar genre. The setting may be the same (London), and some of the subjects may be similar, (immigrants on the edge of society), but the depth of Brick Lane just isn't there.
The protagonist, Gabe, is an u ... (continue)
I enjoyed Ali's first novel, Brick Lane, and picked this one up as it appeared to be in a similar genre. The setting may be the same (London), and some of the subjects may be similar, (immigrants on the edge of society), but the depth of Brick Lane just isn't there.
The protagonist, Gabe, is an up & coming chef who's proving himself by working as a head chef in a hotel while convincing investors to help him open his own restaurant.
The novel follows Gabe dealing with his kitchen staff, with his dying father, with a suspicious death in his kitchen, with his girlfriend, all the while thinking back on his relationship with his father and how things used to be.
The novel does pick up in the last third, but the characters remain one dimensional (I never could keep the five or six kitchen staff separate), Gabe isn't especially likable, and there seems very little coherent point to the novel, just page on page of slow moving, not especially beautiful prose.
Perhaps I was spoilt by a novel dealing with a very similar subject--Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans (Strawberry Fields in the US). Her characters were alive and very identifiable.
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