Pastures NEW
The third novel from Ayisha Malik gets to the heart of a real English village, as Tina Jackson discovers
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To hear an extract from This Green and Pleasant Land
Could there be a more appropriate title for a novel set in a pretty rural village than This Green and Pleasant Land? And a more ‘Little England’ topic than villagers feuding over changes between the old ways and the new? In the hands of novelist Ayisha Malik, these well-worn tropes are giving a fresh, startling twist: This Green and Pleasant Land tackles what happens in the sleepy hamlet of Babbel’s End when one of its residents, Bilal, tries to honour his mother’s dying wish that he should build a mosque in the village.
Warm and engaging, This Green and Pleasant Land is a topical novel about faith, identity, and belonging, and an incisive examination of what divides people, and what brings them together. At once accessible and thought-provoking, it establishes Ayisha Malik, who worked in publishing before her debut Sofia Khan is Not Obliged came out in 2015, as a significant voice in contemporary British literature.
‘The idea for This Green and Pleasant Land came to me as a snapshot a good two or three years ago, before I’d written my second book,’ says Ayisha. ‘There’d been a terrorist attack and it forces you to think about your identity as a Muslim and what it means to be a Muslim in this day and age. My personal choices include the facts that I wear a headscarf and I work in a white, secular industry – publishing. I’ve always been treated with great respect, didn’t have problems with fasting and praying – and I wondered what would happen if I wandered into Random House in a full niqab, and what do we strip off to make ourselves palatable in the wider world, and what would it be like to build a mosque in the middle of this rural community? What if you became completely unapologetic about what you wanted to practice and how you wanted to practice it?’
Ayisha didn’t set out to write This Green and Pleasant Land as a stateof- the-nation book. ‘If I had, I’d have failed,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think my scope was that grand but I was very aware of a how a village is a microcosm of the society we’re living in. I wanted it to be a very English novel.’
Before the storyline begins, accountant Bilal and his journalist wife Mariam have lived happily in Babbel End, where they are the only Asian family in the village; his mother’s dying wish reveals cultural divisions that threaten to fragment the small community. ‘Bilal is very English,’ says Ayisha. ‘I love to embrace this idea of duality, that you don’t have to be one or the other. You can be both, and live side by side. I like my books to be hopeful.’