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1996
ROMESH GUNESEKERA: AN APPRAISAL
BY: T.R.K
Writers of fiction of the Indian diaspora, in which one can include Sri Lanka succeed in attracting and seducing European literary critics by burnishing their stories with a colonial longing for the lost Empire. The calling card is always colonial. The fictional landscape with its towns and the countryside is still as the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British left it: sun-drenched villas with modest Georgian porticos, hung heavy with frangipane and bougainvillaea; latticed mat curtains dowsed in cool water from the well in the garden, a punka driven by Victorian electrics, the smell of musk, of cinnamon and cloves, dust, heat, cow dung and the wilting jasmine of the ladies of the night. One might be forgiven for thinking that Somerset Maugham was back in fashion. Romesh Gunesekera, whose first novel "REEF" was on the Booker Prize short list it seems, is no exception to this rule of seduction.
When "Reef" his first novel was published in 1994, the book joined the mysterious process of selection for the Booker prize award, arguably the biggest literary event of the year for British publishing.
The Booker Prize pageant that has duly took place in October 1994, was televised live from the Guild Hall in the City of London. This venue is much used for glittering occasions like these, including the one where the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes his annual keynote speech, surrounded by the Treasury and the Bank of England advisers.
A panel of literary egg heads that included feminist Germaine Greer, poet Tom Paulin, novelist and a Booker Prize winner herself, Antonia Byatt discussed the merits of the six short-listed books. Romesh Gunesekera's "REEF", was described by Tom Paulin with a bon mot, as a "Pacific novel". I had met Romesh Gunesekera earlier the previous week for an anticipatory chat. Gunesekera with his slim good looks and a pile of well coiffeured head of hair looks ridiculously young for a 40 year-old. He seemed cautious if not aloof, sorrowful if not remote. Another interviewer had remarked that he looked unusually calm and unexcited for someone whose first novel had made the Booker short-list. A graduate of Liverpool University, Gunesekera now works for the British Council having failed to get into Publishing. He has had a book of short stories published previously by Granta and reprinted as a Penguin paperback here and in India, although I have seen no references to this elsewhere. The story is about a young Sri Lankan who works as a houseboy and cook and comes of age under the kind and watchful patronage of Mr.Salgado, a mysterious auto-didact and a Marine Biologist. My tentative suggestion that Salgado resembled another long term Sri Lanka resident, expatriate Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clark, a polymath even down to his preoccupation with marine biology produced a mild demur. The treasure trove of books and magazines (Readers Digest, Life, the Almanac) and conversations overheard (Chaos Theory, cooking) provide Triton the young boy a mental room of his own, "where voice is bundled in paper, inscribing the soft grey tissues of my brain."
The book has enchanted almost all the critics, some of them novelists of good standing. "Lovely, subtle, sensuous, poised". "Slight but accomplished". "has a great surface." According to Tom Paulin again, "a prose symbolist poem about the art of cooking"! The chili-factor in this seduction of the Anglo Saxon palates seems an insidious device. Triton grows up and fetches up in England where Mr. Salgado sets him up as a snack-bar owner. The "great good place" that was Sri Lanka is lost through emigration. The main criticism of this otherwise fine novel ("a novella, not a novel") is its self-conscious description of "the colonial world as exotic", made even more strange by the description of the little known Burger community of the Dutch and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. Germaine Greer again:" A slippery little book." There is a bigger, better book from where this one came, says Antonia Byatt, and I agree.
Gunesekera told me that he was averse to writing Tolstoyian epics, as they are dauntingly large and ever really read to the end. He feels that he would rather be read. He countered the rebuke of the critics that the pace of the story accelerated to a "galloping conclusion" and ended unsatisfactorily. The late reviewers might have read the book too hastily and misread the intent of the final chapters. It took Gunesekera two years, several revisions and a near fifty percent excision to finally produce this astonishingly beautiful novel. Although it did not win the Booker Prize with a 5:1 odds from the bookmakers, I understand that it is being translated into six languages and an Indian hard back has just been published. Coincidentally, 1995 is the 60th anniversary of Penguin Books, a much thumbed publisher available throughout the Commonwealth during this period. "Reef" is one of the paperbacks that inaugurate this celebration.
Reef is deft and economical; it evokes and subsumes descriptions of card parties, half-heard snatches of conversations in a sun dappled colonial house where Mr.Salgado experiences the end of an affair. All this provides the rich humus for the self awakening of Triton: he is content in his role as a subservient and becomes accomplished in the crafts he learns. His collection of arts are all feminine: cooking, housekeeping, making festive lanterns. His love for his master is very typical of such relationships in Asian countries: an unselfish and innocent longing, without undertones of sexuality, towards a surrogate father figure.
Gunesekera made his literary debut with a collection short stories "Monkfish Moon", that have an exemplary text book structure beneath their accomplished surface. It takes a slice of life without a beginning or an end: the anxiety of imminent dislocation of the Sri Lankan middle class underpins these narratives. The distant civil war turns into urban terrorism. In a House In the Country, Ray, a middle class Sinhalese who chooses to return to Sri Lanka from England strikes up an uncertain relationship with Siri, a rootless peasant from the Sri Lankan outback. His talents as a builder-carpenter give Ray time to dream boldly of a house in Siri's lost countryside: a joint venture of Ray's money and Siri's skills. The urban war gets too close and scorches the dream. A local newsagent and his shop are incinerated for the political incorrectness of not taking sides. Siri's brother, so the brief news reaching him confirms, has been executed by hanging in the countryside where the house was going to be built.
"Storm Petrel" is a deft portrait of a Sinhalese in London dreaming about his imminent return home to Sri Lanka to run a few cabanas for tourists and in the process be absorbed by his crowded culture. In just a few bold outlines, the returning native's longing predicates imminent disappointment. A few inadvertent splashes from the brush conclude the story.
On a larger scale, people fail to communicate. War has riven a wedge, even between a Sinhalese wife and her Tamil husband living in London in Batik. The inn keeper in Captives smokes with romantic and sexual longing for an English woman guest at his hotel. He has no doubts about his high minded suitability.
Gunesekera's prose, as his readers have discovered "pulses with deceptively simple precision". His observation is "as close as the stare of a voyeur". James Wood writing in the Guardian praised "Reef" obliquely as the only novel "that makes cooking a turkey as thrilling as a murder." The gifted novelist Candia Mcwilliam, who missed making the Booker short-list herself with her book A Debatable Land, said that Reef was "a book of the deepest human interest and moral poise". Penelope Lively in the Daily Telegraph says that the flavour of the book stays in the mind, "as pungent as the chilli in Triton's lovingly contrived dishes". Tom Adair, another critic wrote of "Reef": "It sings like a glassy fountain; beads of pure light."
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