Sparkling intelligence at work
Sal Imam goes through meditations on life
When the gracious young lady who is helping to organize the Hay Festival assigned this book to me to review, she said breezily," It'll be perfect for you because you're so into cricket!" Having come to the end of this marvellous, sprawling, picaresque novel I can see how in one sense this observation was right and how, in another sense, it was not, after all, essential. First of all, it is absolutely true that cricket runs like an electric thread through the whole book. Starting from the title, Chinaman, namely a "left-arm spinner's googly" (which will sound like pure gobbledygook to someone who doesn't know a bail from a ball) to the frequent evocation of some well-known, and some startlingly new, instances of cricketing lore, it is clear that the game serves as the enveloping environment within which the story unfolds. Followers of cricket will relish the many resonances, in-jokes and plot points which refer specifically to the sport. One thinks, for example, of the episode fairly early in the book when a group of wedding guests play the time-honoured party game of imagining the perfect all-time cricket team, which then turns out to have some longer-term consequences. Or the hilarious stories about 'sledging' later in the narrative. It follows, therefore, that a reader who does not know much about cricket will miss out on this engaging dimension of the book. Luckily however Chinaman has so many other equally developed dimensions --- social, political, human --- that such a reader will have more than enough to delve into. In particular of course there is the setting, Sri Lanka, where the story mainly takes placewhich is quite natural given that the author, Shehan Karunatilaka, is himself from there. The country's turbulent history over the period covered by the book, roughly 1980-2000, featuring civil riots, terrorism, all-out ethnic war, assassination, etc., remains a constant menacing presence against the backdrop of the novel's action, breaking through from time to time into the main current of events, to sometimes comic and sometimes tragic effect. A foreign reader will tend to miss out on the full significance of some of these highly country-specific events and personalities but, once again, no matter. One is swept along with such force and pace through the book that one ends up painlessly learning a lot about Sri Lanka's culture and history. Did you know, for example, that Sinhala names usually end in vowels while Tamil names end in consonants? From which we realize that the anti-hero narrator of the book W.G. Karunasena, is Sinhala while the object of his obsession, the legendary bowler, Pradeep Mathew Sivanathan, is Tamil, a fact of quirky interest given the ethnically-charged milieu of the novel. This then is the core of the story. A has-been sports journalist, the aforementioned W.G. Karunasena, known as "Wije" for short, makes it the focus of his benighted dipsomaniac life to ferret out the details of the career and current whereabouts of a cricketer named Pradeep Mathew, who, he firmly believes, was the best spinner ever produced by Sri Lanka and perhaps by any country in the world. It so happens, however, that all the facts about this person are shrouded in a mystery which seems only to grow the more Wije continues to search. Tantalizing glimpses alternate with red herrings, except one doesn't know which is which. Every so often one is ready to dismiss the whole tale as nothing more than a doomed quixotic adventure, which is all the more believable because Wije is accompanied throughout by a Sancho Panza-like figure, his close friend Ari, the one who 'smiles but only shows his teeth when he's lying'. Each time though, to confound the reader, a nugget of staggeringly realistic weight is then thrown into the mix. For example, the description of the "double-bounce" ball, which breaks successively in opposite directions, that Pradeep supposedly perfectedso lovingly detailed that one cannot help but suspend disbelief and imagine that such a miracle delivery is indeed possible. Throughout the chase for Pradeep we are kept in doubt about whether this is all just a tall story or whether it could conceivably be factual. It is a measure of the writer's artistry and technique that this suspense is maintained up to the very last page of the novel, and even beyond! But, in the course of the book, the author, Shehan Karunatilaka, pulls off yet another sleight of hand which, to me, is worthy of even greater notice. As the pursuit of Pradeep goes on, imperceptibly the reader begins to get more and more involved with the pursuer. Wije emerges in all the glory of his disreputable but irresistible personality, as lovable a rascal as ever existed! Even his worst character flaws get transformed into mere foibles because of the ruthless honesty and wit with which he observes, and judges, himself. Whether hobnobbing drunkenly with his cronies or quietly lusting after unapproachable women, whether needling pompous officials or placating assorted gangsters, Wije remains one step ahead of his fate. His relationship with his only child, Garfield, is sensitively drawn. Exasperated by the, usually disastrous, life-choices of his son, "a typical twenty year old, a fool who did not know he was one", Wije secretly holds him very close to his heart. Garfield in return is caught in a spiral in which disgust for his father is twined with a muted sympathywhich only grows as the years pass. And naturally Wije has a long-suffering wife whom he irritates and charms in equal measure. Finally, we realize that the book has become a meditation on life itself, summed up perhaps by the moment of understanding right at the end, "Just like love, karma can wield its club in strange ways". A great book, written with a sparkling ironic intelligence which produces choice, memorable, lines on almost every page. It is not structured like a classic novel and the reader has to be prepared to skip back and forth in space and time and among a whole universe of exotic characters. Sometimes it can be hard to keep everything in straight order but that is, I am now convinced, the very purpose of the author, who may have done well to take up cricket as a profession, left arm spinner maybe? Certainly Shehan, if I may be permitted a cricket observation, in your whole over, we could never middle you!
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