Brick Lane should be allowed to flourish

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Things are worse than I thought. When I wrote yesterday's blog on the demands for self-censorship I had misgivings about making Prince Charles the figurehead over his unwillingness to stand up for Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane and the film. He is so well known as a meddling fool, a kind of prince and court jester all in one skin, that I feared people may well think I was exaggerating the danger of this growing trend. I had not read the Guardian's editorial of 27 October on the book and its author. The editorial is a farrago of tendentious sentiments and queries that don't quite face up to what the writer cannot quite say outright. What business does a "mixed-race Oxford graduate" have writing about ordinary Bangladeshis in east London? She should have taken special care in writing about a "new" subject, especially when it is a "community". The Bangladeshis are too various a group to speak as one. They are "real people" living in "real" communities. What tosh. There has been a robust response to the editorial in the newspaper's readers page, mostly in defence of fiction as imaginative work and of the freedom of expression in which novels like Brick Lane should flourish. However, having read the novel, I would also like to affirm that it is clearly authentic both artistically and as social reportage and far from ridiculing or disparaging a "real" community, its insights into the lives of Ms Ali's characters inspire sympathy and understanding. I can discount rumours that it was Charles who wrote the editorial - the leader writer had clearly read the novel. Or had (this is my guess) he?