While I agree that there is no necessary connection between cultural hybridity and experimental form, I shall argue here that cultural hybridity has a formal as well as a thematic register to depict Britain's new hybrid society through realism is not the same as to depict it through other representational modes. Head's argument, however, is essentially content-led: for him, the radical nature of postcolonial subject matter is transmitted to the reader irrespective of the formal strategies employed by the writer. Thus, he feels, it is wrong-headed to assume that realism can be equated with a broad cultural conservatism. Head's point is that many novels that can be described as traditional-that is, characterized by linear narratives (often focused on individual growth), the cultivation of linguistic transparency, and an invitation to the reader to "identify" with the characters-have examined the experience of multicultural Britain in an innovative fashion.
Rushdie's exuberant magic realism is thus sometimes seen to exemplify the kind of formal reinvigoration of the novel in Britain that the postcolonial era makes possible.However, such an easy equation between experiment and cultural hybridity can imply a simple opposition between experiment and tradition that is inappropriate, with traditional realism coming to embody a reactionary conservatism. In such a view, you either have a startlingly innovative style and rapturous presentation of multicultural energies, or you have neither. productive cultural hybridity is commonly (and erroneously) perceived to go hand-in-glove with overtly experimental forms. The novels he looks at have much in common in terms of subject matter with Brick Lane it is thus interesting that he addresses the question of the troubled relationship of postcolonialism and realism in a subsection titled "Ethnic Identity and Literary Form." He argues: In the chapter "Multicultural Personae" in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Dominic Head has investigated "the hybridized cultural forms that might be produced in an evolving, and so genuinely, multicultural Britain" (156).
Because it is a realist narrative with a postcolonial story, it offers an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between the formal strategies of mimetic fiction and the historical contexts of multiculturalism and immigration.
Monica Ali's 2003 novel of Bangladeshi immigrants in London, Brick Lane, has been a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic.
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