A long and often funny story dealing with immigration in the UK,
particularly the problems faced by Asian and African immigrants, ending
with a rather scientific twist, biogenetics. It starts with Archibald
Jones (white English) and Samad Iqbal (Bangladeshi), friends joined by
the first World War in Europe fighting for Britain, now in their forties
in North London. They are both married recently to young ladies,
Archie’s being Clara, the only daughter of black Jamaican immigrant
parents. The story then runs backwards and forwards tracing different
generations of their families: Samad’s great-grandfather Pande that was
supposed to have started a failed mutiny against British colonial forces
in the then-India; Clara’s mother Hortense and her own mother Ambrosia
who was impregnated by a white British civil servant in Jamaica; the
lives of their children, Irie Jones on the one hand, and identical twins
Magid and Millat Iqbal, from birth to their late teens. Though from
rich families in Bangladesh, in the UK, Samad can do nothing but work as
head waiter in a restaurant while his wife sews away all day. Treated
with humor are such issues as cultural identity, assimilation,
homosexuality, Christianity (The Jehovah Witnesses in particular),
Islam, juvenile delinquency, teenage social life, the violence meted out
to foreigners by whites, religious fundamentalism, etc.
When
Irie and Millat are caught in school with marijuana, a new phase begins
in the story, the introduction of the Chalfen family, who thereafter
influence the rest of the plot. Caught with the two is the innocent
Joshua Chalfen who however lied that he was a dealer in the substance.
So the two get sent to Joshua’s family as a sort of social experiment.
For Irie, the experiment pays off as the Chalfens help her regain her
nearly-lost academic bearing, but for Millat, the experiment did not pay
back as much, as he became more and more violent and sexually
promiscuous, eventually joining up with a Muslim group. It is Millat who
got sent back to Bangladesh by Samad in a failed attempt to Islamize
him, that gets very close to Marcus, the head of the Chalfen family and a
genetic scientist. From mail correspondence, Millat is brought back to
the country where he lives and works with Marcus who decides to fund his
university education. Marcus Chalfen’s experimental project called
FutureMouse, a genetically-modified mouse that he could control, brings
the story to a climatic conclusion as different groups plot against it
for different reasons.
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