—
For The Critic

—
For The Critic

Well, a decade on, that situation’s only got worse. Karunatilaka and I are now related. Wife’s cousin’s cousins… we are fairly confident.

Betweentimes, Chinaman has gone from strength to strength. It won a raft of prizes (Gratiaen, Commonwealth, DSC South Asia), has been or is being translated into several languages (including Sinhala), and last year a Wisden panel voted it – a quite absurd achievement, this – the greatest novel and second-greatest cricket book of any kind of all time. The umpteenth printing is now out, via Penguin India, in a new ’10^th Anniversary’ special edition: hardly standard practice for even the most successful novels.

Nor has Karunatilaka been resting on his laurels. All jokes aside about the difficult second album/novel (he’d be quite happy with either, I suspect), he has already published one children’s book (Please Don’t Put That in Your Mouth) and written the follow-up; there is open talk of a short-story collection; and there is the somewhat unexpected matter of a forthcoming cookery book – a co-project with his wife.

–

Chats with the Dead is the story of Maali Almeida, a 34-year-old photographer who ‘s good at ‘winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants, and photographing scary places.’ Or rather was – because he’s dead now.

It’s Sri Lanka, 1989, and Maali had been in bed, photographically-speaking, with a lot of the conflicting parties, not to mention their agendas. The JVP, the government, the BBC, a Tamil-rights group; he has been to the frontlines for all of them. To say he was ‘promiscuous’ would strike, well… exactly the right tone. And in a box he keeps of his disturbing/unpublishable outtakes, he even has a photo of his killer – ‘the chances of liberating [which] are as likely as Lanka winning a World Cup.’ He just can’t remember who it was yet: whereby, our detective story. ‘It is funny and unfunny what your brain chooses to retain.’

He had also been in bed, non-photographically-speaking, with, among others, his girlfriend Jaki and his boyfriend DD – a love triangle whose sides don’t meet (based loosely on the life of Richard de Zoysa). These two are also cousins, because, y’know, Colombo.

He now finds himself in some aspect of the afterlife – though quite which he is yet to fathom. It is a busy place (as Nietzsche once put it, the living are only a very small subset of the dead), and by and by he crosses paths with a dead lawyer, a dead bodyguard, two dead lovers… some helpful, others vengeful, a few competing for his soul, and most of them frustratedly trying to chat back with the living. So now he has to learn ‘the rules’, as well as solve the mystery of his murder.

It is the Mahavamsa meets The Matrix… in a Sri Lankan government department.

‘When you fantasized about heaven you thought you’d be greeted by Elvis or Oscar Wilde. Not by a dead doctor. Or a deceased Marxist.’ But by page 16 he’s met both, and is now watching his own corpse being incompetently disposed of by paramilitary goons, at Beira Lake. And while he talks thus, retrospectively, to himself (the whole thing’s in the second person), there swirls around him an all-comers spirit realm of fanged ghouls, minor deities, baby-stealers, charms, seances, sorcery, urban legends, prayers, dreams and talking animals, an inventive theological mix of everything from Kuveni’s curse to the Kotahena Crow Man in his urban underpass.

There exists already a Karunatilaka style, and it is here in spades: dive bars, Colombo culture, books, art and (particularly) music, the things that are – and are not – talked about. His taunting games with names and places. A cheeky drop-in from the boys in Chinaman. A page-long parody of Anil’s Ghost? And then the storyteller’s signs deployed by every shifty author from Herodotus to Ondaatje – ‘All stories are recycled, and all stories are unfair’ – the whole lot strung together with the now-familiar mischievous logic, verbal levity and seamy humour that mark him out as the Sri Lankan counterpart to Marlon James.

As with James, this doesn’t always make for pleasant reading (consider Maali’s job); but then his thoughts on all those easier alternatives might well be coded in the line, ‘Monsoons and full moons make all creatures stupid.’

Chats with the Dead is considerably more direct in its satire than was its predecessor. Besides, the stakes are higher. The abject slavery of many lives; the rank iniquities of much religion; the dreadful suicide rate. And as he picks at these scabs of SL’s less-than-savoury history, Maali’s most unflattering (and generally unchallenged) remarks are reserved for the nature of the post-Independence nation: as a corrupted paradise, on its political class, and on its tendencies to violence. ‘Yakas are made, not born,’ someone admonishes. It’s not conciliatory, nor is it all that optimistic. Karunatilaka – I mean, Maali… – has a savagely critical reading of the self-conscious national lust for a rapacious origin.

Reflecting on the spurious léonine self-image of his countrymen, Maali reflects that ‘If we must have a national creature, if it must be on our flags, in our myths, and painted on our sports teams, why must it be the clichéd lion? If we must have an animal as a national symbol, let it be something original that we can own.’

‘Like many Sri Lankans,’ he goes on, ‘pangolins…’ – but I shan’t spoil it for you. Needless to say, the month or so since Chats‘s launch has seen you-couldn’t-make-it-up links form between the pangolin, Sri Lanka, and the realms of death and afterlife.

Chats is an entirely successful and perfectly mature novel, as good as – albeit much darker and less full of, well… life than – Chinaman. But it’s not perfect. Too many variants of ‘Maali’, ‘malli’, ‘Maal’, ‘Malin’, and so on for the untrained eye/ear; some minor characters who might be given clearer edges (or got rid of/merged); some textual messiness; an anachronism or two; a couple of vague inconsistencies, and one hell of what seemed like a twist (read literally) just pages from the end, but which turned out to be two sentences in need of much more careful separation. A lot, frankly, that ought to have been dealt with by professional wordsmiths at a world-bestriding publishing colossus.

But the bigger problem, I fear, will be one of international ‘accessibility’. In my review of Chinaman I noted that I thought the quite heavy preponderance of little-known Sri Lankan terms and Singlish might have the effect of denting saleability. The international success of that book would suggest that I was wrong – or that assiduous changes were made during the foreign publication process.

The same applies here. Minor matters of vocab or narrowly-regional reference (there is a sharp remark about the vulnerability of shop signs ‘that end in consonants’, e.g.) can of course be edited; but in the case of Chats, the hardwired very-Lankan-ness – the ’80s politics, the social concepts and the mytho-religious lexicon: the meat and bone of the matter (if one can use that term for ghosts) – is perhaps much more pervasive than the first-round local reader might imagine. Sri Lankans may enjoy the novel (doubtless the wrong word) for a certain grim nostalgia quotient; but all but very-interested foreign readers may find that there is rather a lot ‘going on’.

So much for second novels, difficult or otherwise. In literature, as in all else, people are ingrates – so it’s quite likely this will not be greeted with the fanfare that met Chinaman. For better or worse, Chats with the Dead is a novel by a multi-award-winning author, which will be judged on more than its own merits, and/or held to a higher standard.

More locally, the book may yet prove to have landed in a timely fashion. In these increasingly apocalyptic times, let us hope Maali Almeida is wrong when he warns: ‘Do not be afraid of ghosts, it is the living we should fear.’

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

Here are the (brutally-abbreviated) highlights of those proceedings.

—
For The Sunday Times (SL)

Blue: stories for adults
ed. Ameena Hussein

It is practically impossible to write good erotica. By which we mean literary porn. By which we mean ‘even DH Lawrence couldn’t really pull it off’.

In the UK there’s actually an annual Bad Sex Award, routinely won (‘won’) by mainstream writers who succumb to the temptation of a spot of raunch in their novels and are adjudged, in the process, to have suffered the wordsmith’s equivalent of brewer’s droop.

There are literary exceptions, of course (Sebastian Faulks has a quality blowjob scene in Birdsong). But erotica per se is formulaic stuff: the men are always ‘hard as a rock’; the women all ‘wet’; and everyone, regardless of gender, ‘moans’.

Blue: stories for adults is the collection that proves the rule. As Roger McGough’s critic once said of the curate’s egg: ‘It’s all bad, / but especially in parts.’

When Perera Hussein first broadcast the call for stories [sic.], two years back, it seemed an entertaining idea. But the execution – 11 short fictions, plus five poems and (even less explicably) some photographs – has been a shambles, and they’ve wound up with curate’s egg all over their faces.

From the get-go, the project lacks coherence on the very issue of what erotica actually is. Ameena Hussein’s giggly introduction boils down, after three vague pages, to ‘something for every mood’. How many moods of erotica can there be? We are not told. Moreover, there is a world of difference between adult fiction (e.g. Jilly Cooper), ‘stories for adults’ (Roald Dahl), erotica (Richard Burton and every other eminent Victorian), and even – emphasis mine – ‘stories on sex’ (David Foster Wallace); but these terms are used interchangeably.

Between these covers erotica consists in chat-rooms, porn mags, Mills & Boon nostalgia, pseudo-rape, middle-aged affairs, prostitution, romantic poetry, repression, adolescent courtship… or ‘a little bit of everything for everyone’. We are, at least implicitly, OK with gay and straight, romantic and trade, some 69ing, a little light masturbation; but nothing even mildly transgressive (appliances, gender-swapping, bestiality, mutilation; even – heaven forfend! – a threesome).

Also boding ill is the disjunction between Hussein’s naïve coquetry – ‘my depraved mind’ (oh please…) – and over-earnest content: ‘a serious effort to document the changing patterns of what we write and what we read.’ Bollocks. Blue is titillation, plain and simple. It’s just not very good titillation (failing to put the ‘tit’ into… etc.).

Most disastrously of all, though, Blue promises to ‘combine literary writing skills with truly erotic story telling.’ Suffice it to say, it fails horribly on both counts.

I’d like to say that the only thing worse than the bad sex is the bad writing, but the two are inextricable.

Perhaps of necessity, Hussein vaunts the arrival of ‘new writers’ in this collection. But sustained erotic writing – like the activity it narrates – requires dedication and practice. As the Good Book warns, better not, in fact, to be in the dark with the foolish virgins.

Register and tone are all over the place. Words like ‘botty’, ‘nodule’, ‘smorgasboard’ [sic.], and ‘Gruyere’ (no jokes: as in ‘she tasted like…’ – a good thing, apparently) do not belong anywhere near a sex-scene. And the words that do belong there, aren’t. The English language runneth over with synonyms for the pudenda, but a lady’s special zone is really not called ‘her sex’. Not unless you graduated before the Kinsey Report.

Bad narrative pacing is rife. Stories lurch from Ceylonese matinée hand-holding to graphic money-shots without any of that embarrassing, sweaty, in-and-out business which is, er, the whole point of erotica (‘the sweetness of the romance’ trills the introduction).

There are one or two neat lines; but good writing is invariably about irony (a commodity that, in itself, fits awkwardly in the bedroom): and these guys forgot to bring the irony. An order of magnitude separates the good bits from the catalogue of erratica [© Smyth 2011] seemingly plucked from some camp music-hall act:

‘Her finger gently pulled at my curly strands’ (head hair); he ‘came over Mary’ (it means ‘lay on top of’); ‘This smells like a Pandora’s box’ (you’ve seen Notting Hill?); ‘A small guest house cum hotel’; a hero called Fahmy (repeat if necessary); and the young soon-to-be-gay ‘Bookworm’ who reads – no kidding – the ‘Hard Boys series’. To quote but a few.

Technicalia, too. How exactly do panties ‘drip’ when the occupant is sitting down? Which nervous lesbian debutante straddles the object of her desire (her teacher, no less) and then goes in for the kiss? And how does a man propose to his lover when she’s sitting on his face? (Sure, it’s just two words; but you wouldn’t want to fluff it.)

It’s pretty hard to take erotica seriously when you’re laughing. As far as Blue is concerned, it’d be fair to say there’s more erotic clout in the tale of the young woman from Ealing (hint: rhymes with ‘ceiling’). Harder still when you’ve begun to wonder just how little time these authors have spent en lit. Or, as Carl Muller so delicately put it to Candace Bushnell: ‘Have you had much of sex?’

There are two exceptions: Shehan Karunatilaka’s ‘Veysee’ and Hussein’s own ‘Undercover’.

‘Veysee’ is a grubby tale of chatrooms and hookers and the fact that girlfriends rarely look like Hustler centrefolds. Seediness and embarrassment are literary paydirt – especially for male writers. But ‘Veysee’ is not overt erotica (the only story not purpose-written for this project?), and that’s why it works as a story.

In ‘Undercover’ a maritally-frustrated Muslim woman, ashamed of her urges, wraps herself in a cloak (do you see what she did there?) on illicit trips to the cinema, where she gets off with an anonymous lover.

Hardly ground-breaking in terms of content; but what separates these stories from the also-rans – apart from basic authorial talent – is the fact that sex is the motif and not the core function. (cf. ‘What is erotica?’)

The rest is down to fundamental failures of craft. Shaky tone; slap-dash allusion; too much telling-not-showing [reprise virgin gag here]; clunky Singlishism; literary name-dropping; bullish contemporaneity (general tip: to write like Joyce, you have to be a genius like Joyce).

Or failures of literacy. Typos; bad punctuation; weird and inconsistent syntax; verbs changing tense mid-sentence; mangled metaphor (‘The door had been opened. All he had to do now was play it by ear.’); the drafting not undertaken (‘She could be saying anything for all I know and I wouldn’t know…’); the unnecessary clause not excised.

In short, all the oft-lamented hallmarks of contemporary Sri Lankan English literature.

Where, you cry, was the editor? And just how bad were the submissions that didn’t make the cut?! (A handful of Colombo literati are Acknowledged for their help in reading and ranking the original three-dozen offerings. Said literary patsies were apparently not informed that their names were to be used as intellectual collateral for stories they had dismissed as – and I quote – ‘crap’.)

One of Blue’s poems contains the lines ‘You gotta be an artist in this game.’ and ‘Poetry and originality? / Zilch! / What the fuck were you thinking?’ What indeed.

Pace Hussein’s assertions, these stories do serve one socio-anthropological purpose. The coy narrators, the covert relationships, the schoolgirl unworldliness, the men impressed by their ability to undo a bra (pity the women!); the paucity of established writers, the pseudonyms, and the abysmally soft accompanying photographs (no, it’s not sexier with the clothes on) – all reveal Sri Lanka as a place very much not in step with contemporary sexual realities. (Yeah, who knew? Attempting to Google ‘bad sex award’ I was blocked by a porn filter.)

And if one accepts that the book, as a social ‘document’ (ngh!), does at least attempt to ‘challenge stereotypes of Sri Lankan sexuality’, we must also accept that it does nothing but confirm the certainties of Sri Lankan English literature. If ‘the stories give you Sri Lankan erotica as it is written today’, there is little cause for celebration. Blue may have flung wide the doors of the closet – but only to reveal that the closet was bare.

—
Published in Ink.

Chinaman is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you. If you don’t have a spare Rs. 800 to rush out and buy it right now, then starve yourself/rent a trishaw/sell your grandmother – whatever it takes to raise the cash.

Can we leave it there? No, I suppose not.

But Chinaman is that good. Very possibly the best novel to have emerged from Sri Lanka since… well, since Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka. And it’s not just me that thinks so. When the novel won the Gratiaen Award 2008, it was unanimously selected by a panel who commended it for widening the definition of Sri Lankan literature while still dealing in contemporary realities (polite code for ‘we were overwhelmed by a substantial book [500+ pages] that didn’t once mention mangoes, jak fruit, walauwas, monsoons, destructive marriages, declining dynastic fortunes, or the humorous difficulties inherent in putting on a saree’).

Chinaman is the story of the little-known Sri Lankan test bowler, Pradeep S. Mathew, as researched and narrated by washed-up sports journo WG Karunasena. To hear WG tell it, though, you’d think Mathew wasn’t simply Sri Lanka’s most underrated spinner, but the greatest cricketer who ever lived: apparently, he skittled every noteworthy batsman of the 80s/90s, counselled Murali not to change his (allegedly questionable) action and taught Warne the skidder, and generally made a habit of notching up figures that sent the statisticians scurrying for their copies of Wisden. And then he vanished.

Some attribute Mathew’s ill-fated career to his being Tamil. Others accuse him of match-fixing and other shady dealings (because of his being Tamil?). WG’s summary (p1): ‘Wrong place, wrong time, money and laziness. Politics, racism, powercuts and plain bad luck.’

As for WG himself, when he’s not trying, single-handed, to resurrect the legend of Pradeep Mathew he’s busy worrying about his drink-ravaged body, his estranged son, and whether his arrack supply will run out before his wife does. (It is one of the great strengths of the novel that WG is not a man who eats much fruit, feels moved by the rain on his face, or appreciates the inherent humour in tangly ladies’ garments.)

Set against Sri Lanka’s post-‘96 cricketing euphoria/hysteria, Chinaman is worked up to be variously ironic, hapless, humorous, sad, touching and grim, the novel very naturally incorporating both men’s stories – one mercurial has-been searching for redemption and vicarious fulfilment in the story of another – as well as a fair dose of what might (but need not) be chaos-in-paradise metaphor for the state of the nation in the last two decades.

Perhaps more surprising, given the traditionally arcane nature of cricket and cricket-writing, the book is fully comprehensible to anyone with even the vaguest awareness of the sport. There’s plenty to occupy the cricket geek, certainly, including some classic trivia (The first test match was between which two countries? How much do you know about the Israeli cricket team?); but it is to Karunatilaka’s credit that the cricketing nerdathon always comes second to the story of WG and his best friend, school-teacher-turned-amateur-statistician Ari(yaratne Byrd), as they fumble through their late middle-age, trying to see their great passion to some kind of conclusion before their innings is chalked up on The Big Scoreboard in the sky.

What sustains the plot – crucially, given its basic grounding in the detective genre – is the practical fact that, even for the most extreme follower of the sport, proving or disproving the existence of an erstwhile minor cricketer is no mean feat. Those whose first reaction is to ask, hearts a-pounding, whether Mathew is real – and if so how they could have missed him – will find no easy answers here. Mathew’s near-invisibility, statistically and in the flesh, is entirely consistent with the mysterious context of his life (and the whole point of the novel). His 10-51 against New Zealand at Asgiriya – best ever test bowling – was scrubbed from the record books when the match was denied test status. The best ODI bowling – 8-17 against the mighty Gibraltar (source: fan site, thegreatpradeepmathew.com) was not recognised, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the ICC. Accusations of ball tampering in SL club games saw other astonishing figures expunged. Plus the fact that he began his career, at school level, playing illegally and in disguise for schools he did not attend: perforce, his success was attributed to other players.

This is a fully mature Sri Lankan novel – by which I mean a fully mature novel which happens to come from Sri Lanka. Chinaman is world class, in the sense that it not only bears its own quite considerable weight, but could be read by anyone anywhere in the world, as modern and international as a novel need be. And if there are a few references that are a little opaque to the foreigner, then they are infinitely preferable – both with regard to reading pleasure and the health of the national literature – to yet another ‘Sri Lankan’ novel narrated by someone with one foot in Tooting or Toronto.

It also concerns real, or at least realistic, people. Urban types with not a great deal going for them. People who drink. People who swear when they drop things. People whose cars (and livers) break down. By filtering WG’s extraordinary search through the next-door and everyday – rather than straining for semi-mythical resonance, constructing transparent allegories or wheeling out limp facsimiles of heroes from ancient texts – Karunatilaka finds a short-cut to expressing what lit. types deem to be ‘universal truths’ (i.e. things we’d all like to think we might have expressed given enough moments of clarity). These are people with whom we can sympathise: in the wonderfully cantankerous chats between WG and Ari; the cheery cameos by the likes of doyen Tony Botham (can you see what he’s done there?); the pricking sketches of various cricketing personalities, like the obnoxious wife-beating Yorkshireman who will not be named but who I believe played for England c.1740, sees no merit in any player since (unless they too hail from Yjöorrrk-shee-err), and whom anyone who’s ever listened to test commentary will, at least once, have dreamt of punching in the face.

In terms of its prose style, though, while Chinaman is again commendably contemporary (which is to say that no-one speaks like a civil servant out of a Kipling story), it is, I feel, slightly over-salted with Singlishisms – not of the aiyo and aney type, but of the ‘put it, no, Uncle?’ variety. There are a couple more references to tsunamis than I considered strictly necessary (either metaphorically, or THE…). And I’m not too keen on Karunatilaka’s rather unfussy punctuation. I’d buy the argument that this is how normal folks speak and even write if the bulk of the text were not ‘written’ by its lead character, the professional, prize-winning writer WG Karunasena. (Karunatilaka/Karunasena? Yes, you might be on to something there…)

These are fairly minor reservations. I mention them not because I have any forceful objection to Singlish in representative, characterful speech (or because I fear how quickly these things get off the page/screen and into the classroom, which I do and it does), but because I suspect the book may have done itself out of a chunk of the potential international market as a result. I hope I’m wrong; but we shall see.

One of the best and most striking features of the novel is its very canny double-coda ending (one might even be lured into calling it ‘post-modern’). After the substance of the novel – WG’s research on Mathew – there is a series of appreciations from various of WG’s fellow-characters, followed by the misadventures of WG’s son as he attempts to complete his father’s quest (yes, sorry, the ailing WG doesn’t make it) and get his tome published, amid confusion, obstruction and threats from the seamier side of Sri Lankan cricket.

It’s all cheeky in-jokes and shamelessly self-serving references to, amongst other things, the Gratiaen Award and various publishers with whom the author (Mr Karunatilaka-Karunasena) may or may not have had dealings. So in the spirit of the thing I thought I’d drop Karunatilaka a line confessing my limited knowledge of SL cricket over the decades, and ask that he give me some pointers as to what’s strictly true and what’s not. ‘It’s all true’ came the reply. (Uhuh. You know you’re in the 21st century when a novelist wants you to think he’s writing non-fiction. Also, the copyright page states otherwise.)

So, I resorted to the internet – and imagine my surprise when I discovered that in the last couple of months the web (by which I mean Google) seems suddenly, miraculously, to have registered the existence of both Pradeep Mathew and WG Karunasena.

Of course, in the context of the novel, the real-world existence of any of the characters doesn’t matter one way or the other (though cricket lovers will doubtless spend many hours wrangling over the minutiae of each and every rumour and implication). But literary seekers after truth will be intrigued to note that, in the month or two since I proofed Chinaman, not only has WG Karunasena risen to prominence on the net but so has Kreeda, the sports magazine for which he once penned a noted series of pieces on Sri Lanka’s best cricketers. The Kreeda website offers 11 of WG’s articles, all bearing on Pradeep Mathews, all ostensibly published in the early ‘90s. One is illustrated with a diagram – on ‘flight’ and ‘drift’ – that bears a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in Karunatilaka’s book.

If it seems improbable that a defunct magazine which, in its heyday, ‘had the circulation of an illustrated [sic.] porn rag’, should suddenly be up and archived on the internet, just try clicking on any of the links. The same goes for a ‘Daily News’ article by Elmo Tafeeq (another sports writer cited, with variant spelling, both in the text – or indeed ‘text’ – of Chinaman and in the Acknowledgements), in which Tafeeq reveals his late colleague was writing a book about Mathew, the manuscript of which was not complete upon his death and which Mrs Karunasena says needs heavy editing.

Then there is pradeepmathew.com – all articles © WG Karunasena – and, of course, thegreatpradeepmathew.com. The latter is ‘Under Construction’ – and let’s assume the ‘s’ on the end of Mathew’s name is one of things they plan to change. Likewise the fact that the 8-17 stat against Gibraltar, is – ahem! ‘8-17 against Bermuda’ – contradicted by the extensively-researched Chinaman (by WG Karunasena, available now in all leading bookshops).

It requires some considered application of time and know-how to ensure that a man who doesn’t exist – or at least whom the internet had never heard of until very recently (which these days is the same thing) – tops the page of half-a-million search results. And it’s a tribute, in a sense – above and beyond being further evidence of the ambition and seriousness of purpose behind the novel. Only in a country this cricket-mad could writing a novel about a cricketer also require one to actually breathe life (albeit retrospectively) into the man. Of course, it’s also a tribute to the power of the web: 20 years ago Karunatilaka could have written this novel and only feared reprisals/fan mail from a handful of statistics-obsessed loonies who couldn’t find the requisite scorecards verifying Mathew’s existence.

Still, there’s not much point becoming a novelist if you’re uncomfortable about making your own truths come true. And in the land where, as the Gratiaen’s founder-donor, Michael Ondaatje, once wrote, ‘a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts’, it is high time we saw a first-class novelist emerge as guardian of that sacred flame. On the strength of this book, it seems Shehan Karunatilaka may just be that man.

DISCLAIMER. Beady-eyed members of the reading public will observe that my name appears on Chinaman’s Acknowledgments page. I am proud to say I contributed some basic proof-reading to the project. Impressed by the neat publicity pamphlet distributed at January’s Galle Literary Festival, I requested, and received, an electronic draft of the full text, for review in these pages. Quickly appreciating both the scale and quality of the book – but perturbed by a couple of glitches – I offered my services. End of story. No money changed hands. Most of my suggested changes were not implemented. No, I don’t think my critical judgement was undermined by several close readings of the text.

—

As featured in the (SL) Sunday Times.

The Gratiaen Prize – for those of you not up on your South Asian literary gongs – is an annual award given to Sri Lankan writers for creative writing in English, f(o)unded in 1993 by Michael Ondaatje, with his English Patient Booker winnings.

Writing-in-English is a small crowd here – ‘here’ being a few postcodes of Colombo, principally – as evidenced by the number of past Gratiaen winners who have subsequently become Gratiaen judges (and vice versa). Especially in the predominant fiction category, standard output tends to involve small concerns (gallery openings, affairs, playing cricket in the street) as none-too-subtle metaphors for the big issues (civil war, tsunami, political corruption, colonial legacy). There can be a lot of earnestness. And a lot of cliché.

Until last year, anyway, when Shehan Karunatilaka’s matchlessly ballsy Chinaman: the legend of Pradeep Mathew appeared to recalibrate the entire business overnight. The citation for Chinaman made a totally unambiguous point of praising it for talking about contemporary realities in contemporary, realistic parlance. And it has just, finally, been published – thanks to the Rs. 200,000 prize-money, awarded for that explicit purpose.  

Result: high expectations at last week’s British Council shortlist announcement.

Since January, the triumvirs of the Gratiaen’s reader-writer-academic judging panel had waded through 29 novels, 8 books of poetry, 9 collections of short stories, a few hybrids, a couple of fantasies [sic. as though a separate category], 1 memoir, 0 plays: a grand total of 52 submissions from the last calendar year.

The judges weren’t sparing any blushes. Their opening remarks – ‘moments of rare pleasure in picking out the rare gems, very rare’ – suggested a significant proportion of the 2009 submissions didn’t warrant finishing, let alone re-reading. Clearly, they said with a certain tone, many writers felt obliged to represent the Sri Lankan ‘zeitgeist’ (War – check. Tsunami – check). They noted the abundance of Ceylon-era nostalgia novels: ‘only a few of these, depending on the historical research, were convincing.’ They lambasted the continuing strain of mango-and-monsoon village tales. I was quite cheered.  

That said, I also inferred an important unspoken criterion: viable submissions needed not only to be by Sri Lankans but about Sri Lanka. Macro: a disconcerting remark about the absence of any ‘Muslim perspectives’ this year, as though the Gratiaen were ideally a collect-the-set deck of Happy Ethnic Families. Micro: a potentially-ominous fixation on ‘meticulous research’. Competitive authors, it seemed, need to deal with issues – and in Technicolor historical detail. The judges’ concern that Sri Lankan readers might not get certain international references (for example, to such exotic locales as the Campo di fiori or Knightsbridge), seemed actively to encourage parochialism, rather than inspiring the island’s writers to compete globally. A bad idea even if it were not wrong (the Colombo literati know Knightsbridge better than I do). 

So, given these demanding-yet-slightly-contradictory criteria, who made the cut?

The Whirlwind – Santhan Aivadurai. War novel. Villagers in a northern internment camp, run by the ill-starred Indian Peace Keeping Force. Clunky prose, shoe-horned literary references;

Tangled Threads – Premini Amarasinghe. Past-and-present emigration novel. Funny in places, and written in real, spoken English (not the wistful Brahmanic tones of an all-seeing Dickens-type narrator). A serious contender;

Singing of the Angels – T. Arasanayagam. Short stories, ‘reflecting the traditional and religious aspects of life in the North.’ One begins, ‘The peaceful afternoon is rocked by a mine blast.’ Foreigner-proof vocab – chembu, pooja, Thambi;

Mirror of Paradise – Asgar Hussein. Short stories, domestic scale, wryly humourful. In one, somebody unwittingly drinks a urine-sample (guffaws all round). Ceylonese pseudo-poetic standards (rain, fruit, etc.) cheerily sent up. But punch-lines sadly hammered home.

Mythil’s Secret – Prashani Rambukwella. Children’s novel (published). Fantasy, involving a yaka, or demon, and a boy finding his way in the world. Light dusting of satire, but overwrought prose: ‘sweet-smelling smoke billowed from the shell-shaped holder.’ (All SL writers think they are poets first and foremost. Blame Uncle Michael.)

Pity the judges. They can only work with what they’re given. but two of these manuscripts are not publishable, let alone prize-winners. Are the panel obliged to find 5 shortlisters (10% of total entries)? The unofficial remit of the Gratiaen – ‘Encouraging creative writing in English’ – is not, I feel, specific enough. Perhaps some pointers (not to say rules)?

As for the writers – and at the risk of ending up with a short-term surfeit of Colombo-centric urban tales – many would do well to focus on what they know, and worry less about trying to empathise with the war-afflicted in the Vanni triangle (this goes double for under-employed, ex-pat NGO workers – not that they’re eligible for the Gratiaen).

In his speech for the inaugural award, Michael Ondaatje stressed the importance of supporting serious literary talent, lest Sri Lanka be ‘known only by the clichés of a tourist board and by the nature of our politics.’

Lesson not learned. Alas for Sri Lankan writing in English, Chinaman – already flying off the shelves – begins to look like a fluke, a one-off rather than the start of a new trend.

Meanwhile, and purely on the basis of audience laughometer, my money’s on Hussein’s piss story to win – by a nose.

—

The winner of the Gratiaen Award 2009 will be announced on Saturday, May 8^th.

* inspired by the Galle Literary Festival’s Opening Lines Project

Antony Beevor
In history, as in politics, intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage. In both disciplines, the first casualty of intellectual honesty is one’s wallet.

David Blacker
‘He hit the morning, running, Benzedrine and ginger beer — more wakeup per milliliter than the most hardcore coffee — getting his tired arse out of the sack and into the trees.’ As the sun rose, the exhausted editor, eyes jacked open with several pints of the most hard-core coffee, restored the ‘e’ and ‘r’ to their rightful positions, and silently removed the superfluous comma.

Gillian Slovo
Although he had forgotten his own name, he knew a table when he saw one. Alas, he had also misplaced the word for ‘table’ – so his smugness was short-lived.

Ian Rankin
As Joe unlocked his car, he saw that there was something lying on the driver’s seat, something he definitely hadn’t left there. “I do not appreciate this,” snapped his fictional alter ego, the knife protruding from the small of his back.

Lal Medawattegedara
‘Even the clock, I sincerely suspected, was a conspirator: there was a deliberate withholding of every “tick” that denoted a second, and the resulting tension reminded me of my brother on his death bed minutes before his life ebbed away.’ I put down my pen and glanced across to check that he was still breathing.

Louise Doughty
My father’s funeral took place in great secrecy – he was buried under the cover of darkness and the only attendees, apart from myself, were the cleaner who had looked after him in his last days and a man from the Ministry who identified himself only as ‘a very old friend’. “Best not tell anyone about this”, he said.

Michelle de Kretser
She said they had a choice. She lied.

Rana Dasgupta
When you broke it down, he thought, life was mainly about moving things from one place to another. (The removals business was slow this time of year, and Barry had plenty of time for thinking.)

Ru Freeman
Everything had changed and nothing had changed. Her debut novel was out; but still, now, again, the blank page.

Shehan Karunatilaka
He woke up in a pile of vomit. A preliminary taste-test confirmed that it was not, alas, his own.

Shyam Selvadurai
In her letters, my grandmother had told me about the renovations to Chandra’s home, but I was still amazed when I saw it. The JCB sat, triumphant, on half an acre of scorched earth.

Wendy Cope
When you step outside, perhaps you’ll see
an envoy from the Nobel Literature Committee;
though it’s unlikely.

—
For theartsdesk