Before and beyond ‘Reef’
Romesh Gunesekera in Colombo last month. Pic by Ranjith Perera
Against the backdrop of giant flamboyants and the fashionable bungalows of shady Horton Place, Romesh Gunesekera is obviously a bird of passage. You can tell by his appearance, which in a tweedy way spells Oxbridge. Few passers-by, if any at all, would recognize his unruly mop of hair, poetic deep black eyes or smooth, boyish face. Which is sad- because he chronicled these landscapes in his fiction- penetrating hedges and walls and gardens of Colombo Seven. But in his books he also dipped into the lives of many other Sri Lankans, coming from many milieux. His most famous work probably remains ‘Reef’, the book that got shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
Romesh was in Colombo last month in connection with the upcoming Fairway Galle Literary Festival- a celebration with which he has an umbilical connection, and where he will next year again participate. We slipped into a conversation with this highly lyrical practitioner of prose.
Romesh grew up in nearby Havelock Town and schooled at Royal College. But as a child he was imaginatively planted in the west. Not only because (rather unusually for that particular period) he had been abroad with his father, but also because he was immersed in swashbuckling trashy fiction – spy stories, thrillers, westerns and James Bonds- and films streaming in from the same world.
Ironically, it was much later, when long established in England, that he would dive into the soul of his birthplace using his imagination, and weaving stories from its rich paradisiacal warp and weft.
Romesh’s parents, part of the English speaking middle classes, were of the same generation as Jason and Pearl Ducal of his novel ‘The Sandglass’ – a young couple making their rather heady way up in the world- in the hopeful dawn of immediately post-independent Ceylon.
Romesh’s father was a great reader, being part of that generation who knew the English canon whether they studied literature or not, and conversed easily on Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley, though this did not compel Romesh to pick those volumes off the shelves.
Making a rather spectacular move upwards even when compared to those made by the fictional Jason Ducal, Romesh’s father would move to the Philippines with his family to establish the Asian Development Bank. There Romesh was to fall in love with the mutinous Beat Generation of writers. This was the teenagers’ reaction to having moved to a baseball-crazy cosmopolitan country from a British colonial background- the atmosphere of which now began to feel stiflingly stuffy.
The family’s next move was to England, where among his ‘A’ level texts Romesh finally discovered literature. He would drink deep of poetry, and discover storytellers like E. M. Forster, the Bronte sisters or Graham Greene. The exam, though it may represent for many a harsh trial, was also the means through which many of that generation discovered the magic of words, says Romesh. Phillip Pullman, for example, would tumble into Milton’s Paradise Lost, which gave him the inspiration for all the fantasy books that would flow from his pen.
In Romesh’s case, it is Shakespeare who is an eternal wellspring of inspiration and a personal bible. Hunting with last minute frustration for an epigraph for his first novel whilst on the London Tube, he would look up and see, printed above the handrail as part of ‘Poems on the Underground’, the following from The Tempest:
‘Of his bones are coral made.’
No better line could have embellished the first page of ‘Reef’, that novel at whose heart lies the island’s fragile but protective coral reef- a metaphor for a land about to break into fratricidal self-destruction.
Romesh would later write in gratitude: “As always, Shakespeare could be relied on to make things better. It is to his pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.”
Of course Romesh himself began as a poet, and long before his fiction made its mark a UK magazine would dedicate a spread to his poetry, and he would win numerous poetry prizes. But this work never appeared in book form. This doesn’t really bother Romesh- or his readers- as his prose intrinsically has the qualities of great poetry. “Whether it’s prose or poetry, the handling of the language is what is important for me,” says Romesh, but he may, in the future bring out a compilation of verse.
His first book, Monkfish Moon, a slim collection of short stories having been published in 1992, must have felt rather daunting at first, as it was a period when thick volumes of long novels were the trend, but the nine Sri Lankan stories would soon make the name Romesh Gunesekera something to conjure a mélange of tropical magic and genius in the craft of storytelling.
His second book and first novel, ‘Reef’, was for him the most surprising and rewarding, because the readers would receive it with much sensitivity, surprising him by perceiving much more depth than he had seen in it while writing.
Take the ecological importance of the reef for example. In the book, the marine biologist Mr. Salgado warns of the vulnerability of the coral reef, saying that “if the structure is destroyed, the sea will rush in”- written before 1994- when few would have contemplated the possibility of a tsunami more than a decade later.
After his 1998 novel ‘The Sandglass’, “a complex reconstruction of warring dynasties and corporate greed set in Sri Lanka and Britain”, came ‘Heaven’s Edge’ (2002). This was an alternative reality novel against a backdrop 30 years into the future in a mythic ‘emerald isle’, inspired by rereading Homer’s Odyssey and by other quests, from Conrad to the Ramayana.
Maybe to compensate for the splurge of invention in ‘Heaven’s Edge’, his next novel ‘The Match’ was laid out on solidly familiar land- 1960s in the Philippines, 1990s in London and some parts of Sri Lanka. But Romesh, who wants a thick screen between his fiction and his private life, would not be lured to call the book autobiographical.
‘The Prisoner of Paradise’ (2012), a historical novel, is set in 1820s Mauritius where the British transported Ceylonese political prisoners, including the noble Ehelepola. The book, given Romesh’s meticulousness, meant much research into the period and the language.
‘Noontide Toll’ is the last novel Romesh wrote. It is a collection of linked stories told by a van driver, who travels around Sri Lanka. Set immediately after the end of the war, the book examines how things are changing and how people are negotiating with the past, “with the history that we all have- and trying to understand what the future might be. So it’s a book that explores difficult issues- how much of the past you should remember so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes. And how much of it you need to forget to try and heal things and reconcile things.”
The book was also his most swiftly written. Though he takes quite a few years to write a book, he wanted ‘Noontide Toll’ to appear in the immediate post-war period it describes. Otherwise he takes much time and care over a work- ‘The Prisoner of Paradise’, with its historical minutiae to authenticate, taking almost eight years.
One of the most delicious aspects of Romesh’s prose is how his Sri Lankan characters go to town with their English. Probably no other writer captures so well the idiosyncrasy of a dialect that is filled with local spice, piquancy and colour used by speakers to take it off the dull, musty, colonial and Victorian straitjackets and corsets it would otherwise be trapped in.
In the pages of Romesh’s books you come across many an anglophile. When asked if he is one, Romesh hedges a bit- but he points out that identities are always plural and ‘you are never one thing,’ so he is at the same time British and Sri Lankan.
“Sometimes people are encouraged to think you are only one thing. And I think that can lead to difficulties. Even in a family, if you are just a son, just a daughter- that can be very restrictive.”
Romesh enjoys teaching writing at Goldsmiths College, the Arvon Foundation and the Guardian Masterclass Series, engaging with people who take pleasure in an art “that takes a certain kind of person and certain kind of interest.”
It was actually Romesh who first sparked off the idea of the Galle Literary Festival- though unwittingly. Geoffrey Dobbs was present when Romesh was doing a series of readings in London on Sri Lankan writing, and later the two of them would discuss the possibility of a local literary festival. “I thought it will take longer to organise, but he did it very quickly. I am glad to see that it’s in its 10th edition.”
Romesh is immensely proud of our home-grown festival, particularly because it stands proudly on its feet in a world where literary festivals are still a relatively new phenomenon.
He stresses the importance of continuity in a festival. “It’s a bit like newspapers,” he tells me, “it takes time for them to grow with the audience- with the whole community of readers.”
A supportive base of readers and fellow wordsmiths are needed for any writer to flourish. This is where the FGLF helps, in building a community of readers and writers of good literature. Growing up in Colombo in the early sixties, he was not aware that, probably a few streets or neighbourhoods away, there were writers crafting authentic local stories in English, whereas today it seems that the whole world has woken up to Sri Lankan writing. During tours in India, for example, he would meet people talking with enthusiasm about Sri Lankan fiction. The atmosphere today is one that has everything to nourish a young writer, and Romesh thinks nothing can be more wonderful.
When I remind him that five years have elapsed since his last novel, Romesh assures me that a new novel is imminent (which is one year- a short time in the writer’s terms). It will be set in Sri Lanka in the 20th Century, albeit with liberties taken so it would have the scintillating speculations of alternative history.
“It’s a book about friendship, political awareness, growing up.” As for the exact period, it shares a lot with what is brewing ominously in the horizon right now- “a period when there was almost an equivalent amount of anxiety and turmoil politically.”
This leaves readers with a lot of tantalizing possibilities- would it be a bildungsroman amidst Independence struggles and the momentous and exhilarating Independence itself? Or it could be the dark riots or even the insurrections?
Romesh hopes it will be out in time for the 2020 Fairway Galle Literary Festival. It will be a gift to his readers around the world and it will be nice for ‘Reef’ to have a younger sibling on the occasion that that landmark first novel celebrates its 25th year.