I wrote a review of Dorothy B. Hughes’s bleak noir novel Ride the Pink Horse (1946) as part of my Bingo this year, and said something about how it implodes comforting myths, and Emmalita commented, which was lovely, about how she came back to romance because sometimes people need escape from noir and need comforting myths (I paraphrase). I chewed this over in my head for a few weeks, and ended up digging out an unread romance novel I bought a while back, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, as travel reading. I first heard about this because I listened to the author, Ayisha Malik, discussing Bridget Jones on Caroline O’Donoghue’s podcast Sentimental Garbage, which I enjoyed a lot. The novel does, in fact, question comforting myths that I, as a white English woman, am sometimes guilty of believing in–that despite the cynicism, cruelty, and racism of the government and the national institutions, and a vocally racist and xenophobic minority, most people are tolerant of cultural and religious differences and wouldn’t do things like ask women in hijab to show their hair.
Indeed, Malik herself, and the reviewers and blurbers of the novel emphatically brand Sofia Khan is Not Obliged as The Muslim Bridget Jones; like Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), it harks back to Pride and Prejudice, and like Bridget, Sofia is in her early thirties, and living in London, and working in publishing, and has a mostly self-induced chaotic dating life. But also Sofia wears hijab with her skinny jeans, and lives with her parents, and doesn’t drink; instead of calculating how many glasses of chardonnay she’s imbibed, or whether she might be pregnant, Sofia navigates being “brown”, as she calls it, and her relations with her parents who immigrated from Pakistan, and the sometimes tense impingement of the cultures she is at home in, and preserving (sometimes literal) space for her faith in an indifferent and often hostile setting. (Although she does think about food and her weight a fair bit, which is an interesting choice for 2015; I can’t see that it adds much to her characterisation). While I did hugely enjoy it overall, it is a weird reading experience, though, for me; 2015 is just recent enough to feel vivid, but also it’s pre-pandemic, which makes it feel like a million years ago. A Free Palestine march makes an appearance, with obvious tragic resonance today.
Sofia has just broken up with Imran; he not only refused to move out from his extended family’s houses, but there was a hole in the wall between their potential new home and the rest of the family. While Sofia is traditional in some ways, this is a step too far. She eventually gets roped in to writing a book about Muslim dating, which means she has to go on dates with eligible young Muslim men, generating a banter-y friendship with the flirty Naim, while having coffee-shop meetings with various less immediately sympathetic chaps and eyeing the tattooed Irish guy who just moved in next door somewhat askance. And then, amid a family tragedy, Imran comes back into her life. I don’t want to go into detail about all of Sofia’s romantic options as it’s fairly easy to guess, if you’re aware of genre conventions, who she actually ends up with–but it all makes sense and is skilfully and not too hastily put together. The diary format is a fun throwback:
Monday 7 November
10.45 a.m. Hurrah! Hannah’s back!
Odd that being awake most hours of the night gives a person a boost of energy; I’ve sent out copies of My Life After Dracula, emailed jacket images to Glamour, sent a pitch to Loose Women, and have even refrained from rolling my eyes at the new (fagless)* work who printed out a hundred, instead of ten copies of Shain Murphy’s interview. But I’m serene and efficient, juggling balls in the shape of work, book, sister’s wedding and unprecedented internet friend. And prayers. Obviously.
11 a.m. Arrgghhhh! Three! Three typos!! I missed out the ‘o’ in count. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
11.03 a.m. OK, calm, Maybe they won’t notice.
(p. 115)
*(fags–>UK slang for cigarettes)
So there’s a lot going on here! Politics, comedy, love, culture clash, generation clash, faith, friendship, romance, racism, grief, guilt. Fuckboys (without the sex) and fiancés. But the tone and subject matter shifts are skilfully done; Sofia is an engaging and witty narrator and heroine, with the very human quality of being wise when it comes to other people and a little more blinkered when it comes to herself.
I’ll probably read the sequels, but I’m a little annoyed there are any–the first chapter of the second book is in the back of my edition, and it seems like a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications are being set up, whereas one of the lessons of this book is about learning to be direct with important people. The author interview in the back is also a little…odd…but it’s hard to read tone with these things, especially several years later.
Title quote from a section heading in Sofia Khan is Not Obliged.
