Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan, by Soniah Kamal

TITLE: Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan
AUTHOR: Soniah Kamal

COPYRIGHT: 2019
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: Ballantine

SETTING: Early 2000s Pakistan
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

In this one-of-a-kind retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern-day Pakistan, Alys Binat has sworn never to marry—until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider.

A scandal and vicious rumor concerning the Binat family have destroyed their fortune and prospects for desirable marriages, but Alys, the second and most practical of the five Binat daughters, has found happiness teaching English literature to schoolgirls. Knowing that many of her students won’t make it to graduation before dropping out to marry and have children, Alys teaches them about Jane Austen and her other literary heroes and hopes to inspire the girls to dream of more.

When an invitation arrives to the biggest wedding their small town has seen in years, Mrs. Binat, certain that their luck is about to change, excitedly sets to work preparing her daughters to fish for rich, eligible bachelors. On the first night of the festivities, Alys’s lovely older sister, Jena, catches the eye of Fahad “Bungles” Bingla, the wildly successful—and single—entrepreneur. But Bungles’s friend Valentine Darsee is clearly unimpressed by the Binat family. Alys accidentally overhears his unflattering assessment of her and quickly dismisses him and his snobbish ways. As the days of lavish wedding parties unfold, the Binats wait breathlessly to see if Jena will land a proposal—and Alys begins to realize that Darsee’s brusque manner may be hiding a very different man from the one she saw at first glance.

Told with wry wit and colorful prose, Unmarriageable is a charming update on Jane Austen’s beloved novel and an exhilarating exploration of love, marriage, class, and sisterhood.

Well, the title says it all. In Unmarriageable, Kamal has taken Pride and Prejudice and set it in early 2000s Pakistan. In this incarnation, the Bennetts have become the Binats, a formerly prosperous family living a much-diminished life in tiny Dilipabad, where eldest sisters Jena and Alys teach at the British Schools. A rich former student of the school is getting married to an even richer society guy, and the wedding is going to be huge -and the Binat's are invited! Society people from different cities are going to be there as guests. To Mrs Binat, it's the perfect opportunity for her girls to find husbands. Especially Jena and Alys, who are already (gasp!) in their 30s.

One of the guests is Fahad Bingla, nicknamed 'Bungles', there with his two sisters. They are extremely rich, and well-known in high society. And so is Bungles' friend, Valentine Darsee. Bungles is immediately infatuated with Jena, to his family and friend's disapproval. They see the Binats as vulgar and not up to their standards. Which is obvious to Alys, and makes her, in turn, dislike them intensely, particularly arrogant Darsee.

This was fun. I liked the idea, and (mostly) liked the execution.

Rather than merely being a story playing with P&P, using the basic plot, this is almost a blow-by-blow retelling. It may not sound like it so much from the description above, because some details in the setup have been changed, but the events that drive the plot forward are just as in P&P. Exactly like in it. This was very good fun in some ways. It was really interesting to see just how Kamal would take a plot point that feels particularly of its time in P&P and make it perfectly natural in almost-present-day Pakistan. And she succeeds, every single time. On the other hand, though, it did make the plot a bit predictable. Knowing exactly what was going to happen robbed the book of some narrative tension.

The characters were well drawn, even the secondary ones. Alys is a bit different from Elizabeth Bennett, in that having been educated in an international school in Jeddah (when the family was in more prosperous circumstances), she has been exposed to more modern mores. She's explicitly a feminist having to cope with all the patriarchal bullshit, and not shy about calling it out, at least when it's safe to do so. Whereas Elizabeth, while aware that some of the stuff around her is bullshit, is more a woman of her time.

The setting was vivid. I loved seeing a different Pakistan from the one that comes through in the news. All the little details that were there not to make a particular point, but because that's what would be the reality... like how for a long-distance journey the Binat girls would of course take the Daewoo bus (that's what upper-middle class people would do in Uruguay as well... not Daewoo, in particular, but the same kind of buses. I once took a 24-hour journey to Paraguay in one of those things!). Anyway, it was tiny details like that that made this for me.

There were a few of negatives, though. First of all, there is a certain lack of subtlety in Kamal's writing, where points are sometimes made a bit too explicitly. This results in characters being a too cartoonish sometimes, but it isn't just that. For instance, we're told exactly why Darsee and Alys suit so well: the fact that they grew up in the multinational environment of an international school abroad, the way that has given them a particular outlook on life, their love of books, etc. It was actually really convincing, but did we need to hear this explicitly? It was pretty obvious already. I think it may have worked better if Kamal had trusted that she'd shown this enough, rather than feel she had to state it explicitly, and more than once! It's minor, but an example of something that's sprinkled throughout the whole book.

The one thing I hated, though, was that there was a meanness in some the characters that felt frankly startling. Some of the things Mrs Binat says I felt were genuinely unforgivable. A single example: the Charlotte Lucas character, Alys's friend Sherry, is unable to have children, which is one of the reasons she felt she should settle for the horrid Reverend Collins character. It's clearly something quite difficult for her. Mrs Binat, raging against the woman who 'stole' the man she intended should marry her daughter, calls her "Useless-Uterus Sherry". No. Just no. This was probably Mrs Binat's lowest moment, but there were several others that were close. The cruelty was truly jaw-dropping, and my jaw also got quite the workout with the younger sisters. The fat-shaming in the way Lady (Lydia) treated Qitty (I don't need to do this one, do I?) was revolting. We're talking constant insults. 'Behemoth', 'Whale', 'Cow'... it went on and on.

I think with these characters Kamal really missed the mark. Their equivalents in Pride and Prejudice can behave pretty badly, but there isn't the mean-spiritedness and cruelty that was in these characters. This meant that there was a sour note at the end. I did NOT want Mrs Binat to finish the novel triumphant, with two daughters making spectacular marriages, even though I liked those two daughters and was happy for them that they seemed set on marriages that could make them happy.

MY GRADE: A strong B, very much in spite of Mrs Binat!