The Crossed Keys Chronicle

The Centre

The Centre book cover

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi tells the story of a thirty-something Pakistani woman named Anisa, living in London as a translator, who wants to transcend her basic job translating pop culture and instead work on translating the true classics of literature.

As the book opens, Anisa is recounting a relationship she had with Adam. One of the traits that drew her to Adam was his fluency in several languages. During their mostly amicable relationship, however, he showed no aptitude for picking up any Urdu—Anisa’s native tongue—saying that the languages he did learn, he learned through a very special technique that he doesn’t specify.

As the relationship gets more serious, the couple goes on a trip to visit her family back in Pakistan. On the flight over, Adam speaks incredibly fluent Urdu to another passenger, which incenses Anisa, who thinks he’s been purposely holding out on her.

Eventually, he admits that he just learned it a few weeks ago during a two-week trip to a place called The Centre. She doesn’t believe such a thing is possible, but after enough back and forth, she extracts from him the single referral he has to The Centre. (Clearly, they don’t believe in affiliate marketing.)

The Centre’s marketing pitch is: learn any language you desire with perfect fluency in only two weeks. The only catches are: it’s moderately expensive, and you are sworn to secrecy about how you acquired your new linguistic prowess. Anisa is willing to accept these terms to fulfill her literary translation dreams.

The plot moves shockingly quickly from that point. She travels to the secretive facility in rural England, makes friends with the administrator of it, and magically learns her new language at the end of the session. Then, in a very anticlimactic few paragraphs, we learn that she does fulfill her dream of translating classical literature and receives all the appropriate accolades. The rest of the book involves her discontent with how the language teaching actually works and her attempts to unravel its secrets by any means necessary—including exploiting a romantic-ish relationship she forms with the facility’s administrator.

The book makes it clear early on that something shady is responsible for unlocking the magic of language skills. I feel compelled to reveal what the secret is, only because of how bonkers it is—so please skip the paragraph if you wish to remain unspoiled. The secret to learning languages, dear reader, is cannibalism. At The Centre, they feed people who know the language you want to learn to you. They wrap it up with some of their own special listening tech, but ultimately, as they say: The Centre is people.

The Centre has some interesting ideas, the concept of being able to nearly instantly learn a language is probably third on my list of Things I’d like to be able to do, after playing an instrument and doing magic, but they are told in a simplistic and not very engaging way. I will say that it’s not an overly long book, so it has that going for it. In the end watching some of Duolingo’s viral marketing videos is probably a better use of your time if you’re looking for something scary and language-based.