White Teeth (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

If you like character portraits though, this might be one for you. The story revolves around a number of characters and their relationships with each other. It deals with race, marriage, kids and the like. It also gives an interesting portrayal of the variety that is London.

But that's about it.

For my liking, the characters were described in too much detail. We get to know everything from how people met to their favourite colour and blood group, it seems. And although this is not such a travesty, the plot line does slow because of it - you start looking behind the sofa to find it again.

All this said, ZS does have a lovely writing style. No long show-off words for the sake of it. Just clear, east-to-read prose, which is nice. It's just too blinking long!

If you've got more reading stamina than me though and like books about people and their cultures, feel feel to disagree. The thousands of people reading it on the London Underground can't all be wrong. Can they?

One of the book's main flaws is that in addition to these five major characters, there are the mothers of each, and a veritable wagonload of important supporting characters, including a third family that appears well into the book. There's a lot of coming and going and coming, and on and on as characters assume central importance for ten pages, only to disappear for two-hundred. Smith is trying to weave a very complicated web (many critics call this aspect of the book "Dickensian"), but in doing so, the transitions become awfully jarring, and very often, annoying. A second major issue is that the characters are all types of one sort or another. Smith sets them in motion in order to comment on her grab-bag of issues, but never quite gives them enough individuality or humanity. The good thing is that she does manage to create a unique voice for each . Like Martin Amis, she's has an excellent ear for the rhythms of conversation and the specific vernaculars of both time and group. Similarly, she likes to play with language in a way that is both refreshing and assured.

On the whole, I liked this book-albeit grudgingly. Smith has taken a kind of "throw everything except the kitchen sink at the wall and see what sticks" approach, leaving no major issue unturned in her attempt to leave her mark on the reader. This means that a lot of the threads never lead anywhere, and thus the overall effect is not as strong as she might have intended. A good editor might have been able to pare some elements back a bit, allowing others to blossom more. Similarly, an editor ought to have helped with some of the many inaccuracies that crop up (two random examples: some of the portrayal of the Jehovah's Witnesses is factually incorrect, as are some of the details of Ryan's scooter). Still, as a portrait of multicultural London over the years and how the concept of "being British" has evolved in that time, it works quite well. And its questions about identity and belonging are applicable to immigrants coming to any Western country. The book was made into a 4-hour BBC miniseries, which has still never been released on video in the US.