In this fantastic debut novel, a gifted but unsuccessful Pakistani translator in London makes pennies subtitling Bollywood movies, until her English boyfriend introduces her to an organisation called the Centre. Cult-like and secretive, the Centre puts translators through an immersive process that makes them idiomatically fluent in any language within 10 days. This Black Mirror take on the world of language labs and translation workshops opens up questions of cultural appropriation, the power of language, memory (the learners at the Centre absorb new languages through listening to other people’s detailed life stories) and privilege.
There are serious questions at the heart of The Centre. If you could become fluent in any new tongue as if by magic, have you really earned the right to know it? Do you really understand its culture, its heritage, its nuance? If you gain a skill without doing any work, are you cheating? Is paying a high fee to collect languages so facilely an extension of colonial greed, an entitled white hipster gimmick – or something even more sinister? The result of the apparent worldliness of multilingual people is not increased idiosyncrasy, equality or self-expression but “these sort of ‘neutral’ accents, the kinds of unplaceable dialects you sometimes find in third-culture kids or global cosmopolitan elites raised in the international schools and gated compounds of Oman or Turkey or Singapore”.
Even without the clever notion, I would have blazed through The Centre, because Siddiqi’s easy storytelling and her heroine Anisa’s sweet narrative voice slip down like summer rosé. Siddiqi – herself an editor and translator – has the gift of maintaining propulsion and mystery, while keeping things human and realistic, and it’s lovely to see the world through the eyes of an intelligent, sensitive and sincere protagonist. The story of the Centre and the dialectics of language and translation, appropriation and exploitation are compelling – but so are the details of Anisa and her gauche boyfriend Adam’s cringey relationship, her supportive bond with her best friend, Naima, and her memories of her parents in Pakistan. I could easily have dispensed with the high-concept plot altogether and enjoyed the classic literary questions of what Anisa should choose in life: love or work, home or away, everyday pleasures or big, risky goals.
The Centre is a wonderful novel that deserves to be translated into dozens of languages… by translators with only the best intentions.
The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
