Convincing voices tell a convincing story
View(s):Anthea Senaratna’s The Mango Tree won enviable praise that applies equally well to A Flash of Red from writers of the first rank five years ago. “Authentic voices …. sound clearly in our ears in Anthea Senaratna’s wonderfully varied collection …. Inner lives are laid open here with skill and compassion” is Yasmine Gooneratne’s verdict while Sita Kulatunga highlights “the humour and critical irony in these highly readable and delightful stories”: Tissa Abeysekara unerringly identifies a strength “one hears of the live play-acting voice of the oral story-teller”. A Flash of Red retains this accuracy of tone and idiom that captures and convinces the readers. Above all it shows her perceptiveness regarding the land and its people.
A Flash of Red shows poise and sureness. The stories pulsate with a fullness of life caught by the writer’s flair for sensuous evocation: whether the reaction a character experiences is pleasurable or distressing, it has a vivid immediacy. In Lament which encapsulates what Yeats termed “the cruelties of choice and chance” the house and the furniture speak as clearly as Sita, of the tragedy, not of war but middle-class conventions; the florid celebrations of Birthday Bash show the anxious self-importance of those straining for social mobility, highlighted by sharply detailed mini-episodes, like Piyasiri the gardener’s bath “for which he was allowed two buckets of water” and Rani the ‘daily’ luxuriating in her shower and bath gel since “her daughter had just returned from the Middle East”.
The range of style as well as theme is refreshing: so is the imagination and sensitivity that projects the characters. Gauche hopeful Yohan stumbling helplessly through life, Charlotte whose grit and intelligence cannot save her from numb endurance, the insufferable Hector Bowita are people whose problems prompt our curiosity, sympathy or laughter. Lost Cousin, an effortless fusion of comedy and suspense germinates in tensions created by class and civil war. A Tense Situation – uproarious, Rabelaisan and carnivalesque, deals with the come-uppance of Hector Bowita and the vagaries of English grammar. In contrast A Wee Tot depicts a chilling hopelessness as a woman’s self indulgence dooms the future of her son and daughter.
The characters in The Blue Mug and Cross Roads face harsh circumstances and hard decisions: they are not the customary mindless rural victims but comprehensible, and Anthea Senaratne acutely portrays in Bandula the support that needs no verbalization. The Postman, at first glance an entertaining sketch, delineating the relationship between irresponsible Siripala and his indulgent though strict (and hardworking) mentor and protector, strikes a subtly elegiac note. Change comes and with it goes the security of limited boundaries and familiar faces and patterns of behavior. The Scavengers is terrifying: the limpid non-judgmental prose in which it is written with a minimum of adjectives is a triumph.
In this collection Anthea Senaratne combines a very individual and appealing levity with uncompromising realism.
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A Flash of Red by Anthea Senaratne. Reviewed by Lakshmi de Silva |
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