Writing about real people and places: Germaine Greer vs Salman Rushdie

In interviews, Ali says her family always intended to return to Bangladesh, but in the event they stayed here. Monica won a scholarship to Bolton Girls' School, read PPE at Oxford and later settled down in Dulwich, a smart corner of south London that is a far cry from Bolton or Brick Lane. She was the mother of two children before she began to work on her "cross-cultural" novel, for which she received enormous advances from British and US publishers. Brick Lane was on the bestseller list for 46 weeks and sold 150,000 copies in hardback. Ali was shortlisted for every prize there was.

None of this would have happened if Ali had not created her own version of Bengali-ness. As a British writer, she is very aware of what will appear odd but plausible to a British audience. Her approach to her Bengali characters is not all that different from Paul Scott's treatment of his Indian characters in The Raj Quartet. An author may say she loves and respects the characters she has created. But what hurts is precisely that: she has dared to create them.

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As text Brick Lane is invulnerable, no matter how many copies of the book are burned (so far, none). A writer who hangs the carcass of her invention around the necks of real people cannot expect them to rejoice in a burden that they can now never relinquish. The text will outlast them, realer than life. Generations still unborn will think they know what life was like in the London Sylheti community at the turn of the 21st century - unless a better writer comes along and does a better job, which will be even less forgivable. Writers have a charmed life, rewarded, lionised, premiated and protected against the consequences of their own indiscretion. If reality occasionally bites back, it is no more than they deserve.

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Germaine Greer's article (G2, July 24) about the proposed filming of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane is a strange mixture of ignorance (she actually believes that this is the first novel to portray London's Bangladeshi community, and doesn't know that many Brick Lane Asians are in favour of the filming); pro-censorship twaddle (no, people do not have the "moral right" to prevent the making of a film simply because they have decided in advance that they will not like it); and ad-feminam sneers about Monica Ali. Her support of the attack on this film project is philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected. As I well remember, she has done this before.

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