Margaret Drabble

Marriage Material, by Sathnam Sanghera – review

issue 21 September 2013

Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his home town (now a city) Wolverhampton, with its shabby factories and shimmering new gurdwaras — ‘Wolverhampton, the arse of the Black Country, in itself the bumcrack of the West Midlands, in itself the backside of Britain’.

In Marriage Material he returns to the same rich and little explored multicultural terrain, in a novel that ingeniously ‘shoplifts’ (his word) characters and elements of plot from Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. His tale is also the tale of two sisters, one a loyal stay-at-home and one an ambitious runaway who makes off with a travelling salesman, and Bennett readers will enjoy spotting parallels as they follow the fates of Kamaljit  Bains (Constance) and Surinder Bains (Sophia)— allusions which extend as far as Surinder’s horrid pampered little dog, here not a French poodle but a King Charles spaniel called Jessie, a creature which illustrates all too well why proper Sikh Punjabi families don’t really go for pets.

The girls, like the Baines daughters of Burslem, are brought up over the shop, and struggle against convention, gossip, superstition, the caste system and family expectation.

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