History has a voice in this book, but it’s the people who take centre stage
View(s):
Shankari Chandran: First novel
Book facts
Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran
Perera-Hussein Publishing House
Price: Rs 1,000
Reviewed by Keda
Occasionally I find a book that makes me sob into my sofa pillows uncontrollably. For hours. I couldn’t put this book down and I couldn’t stop crying. No, that’s not completely correct. I stopped crying from time to time to laugh at the humour and tenderness between the characters of this family. I wanted to adopt Nala’s family. I wanted her to adopt me. It is everything I love about South Asian literature – beautiful prose, an exotic, troubled landscape, an impending and then roiling civil war, a migration, dislocation, search for identity, the search for home and loved ones.
However, there was also more in this debut novel. Shankari Chandran offers a searing portrait of a paradise toyed with by colonial powers and then left to the manipulations of religious politics. Or politics in religion’s clothing. She deftly handles a seven decade timeline (don’t be alarmed readers there are dates in the chapter headings), spending long enough in each one, to give you a sense of the rapidly deteriorating communal relations, all the paths that weren’t taken, all the moments when a war could have been prevented.
Although history has a voice in this book, it is the characters and their lives that are centre stage. Well drawn, authentic characters you love, understand, sympathise with, rail against and forgive. They make good decisions, hard ones and bad ones. They are bound to each other by love, a religious duty and grief. Mostly by love.
There is anger in this novel. Shankari Chandran has a background in social justice law and her experience in human rights law, her clear sympathy towards the most vulnerable victims of any war – women and children – is visceral. There are scenes of violence in this book that I struggled with. It was never excessively described. It was restrained and perhaps that was what made the unrestrained subtext horrifying and scarring to read, impossible to forget.
Shankari Chandran is also an ethnic Tamil. Her narrative is an unmitigated Tamil one. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she explores the moral contradictions of the Tigers, as well as those of the Army and the government. But her focus is the moral contradictions of family – of the people who you love and who love you the most.
Song of the Sun God is her first novel. According to her website there is another one out in June this year, set in a futuristic Sri Lanka. I look forward to watching her further dissect her beautiful, terrifying country of origin, with beautiful language, complex characters, compelling plots and unflinching honesty.