Cat & Fiddle
February 2013
Lesley Jørgensen / Scribe
Mrs Begum, a traditional, but not altogether conservative Bangladeshi mother in rural Wiltshire, is concerned to properly marry off her three adult children. But son Tariq, who has seriously flirted with jihadism, seems, despite his return to moderation, to be wholly uninterested, and her two very different daughters are bringing degrees of shame on the family. The worst of the two, at least in the eyes of the paterfamilias, Dr Choudhury, is Rohimun, a well-regarded artist who lives unhappily with her possessive and drug-addled gora boyfriend, a London City trader. Keeping up appearances is fashion-slave Shunduri who, under the pretence of study and a good job in a bank, is living out of home, also in London, waiting endlessly on a proposal from Desi wide boy Kareem. Mrs Begum and Dr Choudhury’s cottage lies in the friendly near-orbit of Bourne Abbey where Dr Choudhury has been advising its owners, Henry and Thea Bourne, about the restoration of the building. As the project nears completion the Bournes’ marriage shows signs of strain and Henry’s brother, Richard, who has abdicated his inheritance of the burdensome country estate, finds himself drawn ever closer to the house which holds more than just one fascinating secret.
Lesley Jørgensen’s debut novel Cat & Fiddle benefits from easy comparison. The most obvious of course is with Pride and Prejudice which, probably not coincidentally, is this year in its bicentenary. Jørgensen’s characters are fairly easy to line up with Austen’s. Mrs Begum is a contemporary marriage-plotting Mrs Bennett and her manoeuvrable husband Dr Choudhury stands in nicely for Mr Bennett. In its multicultural east-meets-west milieu there’s also a fair bit of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.
Like Pride and Prejudice, one of the central conflicts Cat & Fiddle plays out pits individual romantic desire against the compromised pragmatics of tradition. How does this play out when characters don’t want to follow tradition, or have lost tradition altogether? It’s a problem in Cat & Fiddle that is reserved mostly for its Bangladeshi characters. Despite their problems, Anglos don’t seem to have the need to repress that individuality all that much. The thesis, presumably, is that there is no such thing as traditional Englishness to hide behind any longer, only the sometimes hedonistic excess of individualism, a source of sometimes self-destructive ennui.
While there are a lot of characters to keep track of, as the families and their problems spiral ever closer toward one another Jørgensen moves their stories forward in smart, entertaining episodes that, in shifting third person focalisation, step easily between them. The prose style and narrative pace are both brisk, and always end up on the right side of functional. It’s a very entertaining read and I expect Jørgensen will find many readers eager to follow her characters through what is basically a rom-com which, while it doesn’t overplay the clichéd comedic potential of multicultural England, also doesn’t stray too far from the comfortable novel of that country’s manners.
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