Alwynne's Reviews > The Centre

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s ambitious narrative takes on a multiplicity of themes, ranging from race and identity to displacement to gender and patriarchy to the specifics of relationships between India and Pakistan through to the ethical horrors lurking behind the shiny surfaces of late capitalism. And, for me, that potentially vast catalogue of concerns made it seem ultimately lacking in focus: as its various storylines criss-crossed and overlapped, I became increasingly uncertain what it was that Siddiqi wanted me to take from her fantastical tale. Yet, despite my reservations, I still found this a surprisingly gripping read.

The Centre’s narrated by Anisa, a deliberately frustrating character who veers between hyper-analytical and appallingly narcissistic. Anisa moved to England from her home in Karachi to study, twenty years later she’s living in London supported by her wealthy family and half-heartedly churning out sub-titles for Bollywood films, while dreaming of a more respectable life as a literary translator. A chance encounter turns into a relationship that leads her to the mysterious Centre, a place where ten days in seclusion can result in fluency in any language its clients desire, including ones that offer far more prestige than Anisa’s Urdu. Once there Anisa develops an unmistakeable attraction to the woman assigned to supervise her studies, and a growing obsession with what lies behind the Centre’s spectacular success.

Siddiqi blends everyday realism – down to the brand of shampoo Anisa favours – with elements of political allegory that sometimes reminded me of Dave Eggers and novels like Michel Faber’s Under the Skin. The plot hinges on the true nature of the Centre’s secret but I worked out aspects of Siddiqi’s later reveals fairly early on – possibly because my past featured a number of anthropology textbooks or possibly because of my familiarity with various forms of schlock horror. And schlock doesn’t seem unreasonable as a term to describe the absurdity of the explanation for the Centre’s secrecy: it’s also an explanation that involves a rather literal take on the relations between colonialism and consumer capitalism. That said Anisa was an intriguing figure, and I liked a number of her wry observations on feminism, language, race and identity, and her disarmingly clumsy attempts to forge stronger relationships with friends and lovers. But the style could be a little forced and the various storylines overly stretched and distracting, I also found it hard to relate to the semi-spiritual strands running throughout. I’ve seen a number of comparisons to R. F. Kuang’s Babel but this is not as skilfully constructed or coherent, even though it could be very entertaining. But as a debut novel it’s more than promising, and one I’m happy to have read, I’ll be interested to see what Siddiqi comes up with next.

Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Picador.