Satire does not always live easily within novels. The mockery of vice and folly can go against the effort to give readers a credible sense of characters' motives. Norma Major's reputed objection to Spitting Image - that the programme never had anything nice to say about anybody - makes the point. Satire is gleefully or angrily negative. Satire thwarts the extension of sympathy to characters that is often the aim of novelists.
Purely satirical prose narratives are hardly like novels at all. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, say, or Samuel Butler's Erewhon have scant regard for the laws of probability that govern novels. Their fictional worlds are held together by their ability distortedly to mirror the other, "real" world. Novelists who are really satirists - Martin Amis is an obvious example - struggle to provide the "characters you care about" that many novel readers expect.
White Teeth has satirical aspirations and some passages of unalloyed satire. These contribute to the sense that it is a novel whose picture of multi-cultural England has escaped obligations of political correctness. Its marginal characters are often satirically imagined types, their absurdity representative rather than distinctive.
They are such as Archie's boss, Mr Hero, the racist who says: "I'd spit on that Enoch Powell... but then he does have a point, doesn't he?" Or the comprehensive school headmaster, who responds to pupil misbehaviour by "not wanting anyone to feel boxed in" and worrying that any pupil "felt the need to lie". They are the stuff of satire, which asks us to see not how everyone is individual (the usual novelistic presumption) but how everyone with a certain occupation or rank is the same.
The novel also has satirical set-pieces. Daringly, Smith tries a cameo of ill-educated, moderately foul-mouthed Asian youths "slouching towards Bradford" in their Nike gear to protest against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. They talk happily of their outrage at a book of which they know nothing. "My uncle says he can't even spell."
Smith likes to make space for gloriously absurd discussions. Especially good is the gathering of the animal liberationist group, Fate (Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation). Its members debate the best form of direct action at the public meeting where scientist Marcus Chalfen will unveil his genetically programmed mouse. "But surely the mouse in this case is a symbol, ie this guy's got a lot more of them in his lab - so we have to deal with the bigger picture." His comrade demurs: "To me that's absolutely the opposite of what Fate is about. If this were a man trapped in a little glass box for six years, he wouldn't be a symbol, you know?" The parody is pitch-perfect. "The gathered members of Fate murmured their assent." The comic earnestness of proceedings is emphasised because seen through the eyes of Joshua Chalfen, whose attachment to the group is his hopeless, unstated lust for its ringleader, the delicious Joely.
Satire is also dominant in the depiction of the Chalfen family, the leftwing, middle-class clan who welcome the wide-eyed Irie and the abusive, exploitative Millat into their midst. Joyce and Marcus Chalfen speak with appalling openness about sex, openly boast of their children's intelligence and encourage them to befriend "brown strangers". "Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian... who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends."
The depiction pleasingly caricatures a certain smug yet affable middle-class Englishness, with its intellectually condescending, imperviously tolerant rationalism. The Chalfen chapters are droll, yet their inclusion risks contravening the novelist's own contract. Her method with her main characters has been anti-satirical: to extend to each prevailing folly, if not exactly exoneration, at least the grace of a novelist's sympathy. The two Jehovah's Witnesses, their hopes absurdly fixed on some predicted date for the end of the world, are treated with subtle amusem*nt. Why not those self-satisfied bourgeois Darwinians too?
· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London
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