Arts
16-year-old Praveen’s magical doorway into fiction writing
What the Gratiaen judges had to say
“….its ambitious and colourful presentation of new fantastical worlds through the character of a child, its imaginative plot buildup, and its attempt to present to young readers complex ideas through metaphor and imagery.”
Sea pirates in Viking ships with high technology, castles with dungeons where English butlers run boy monarchs with sangfroid, spinach monsters who sprout out of your baby sister’s imagination, and of course an inter dimensional travel machine. These are some of the things Praveen Jayamanna has been living with.
Praveen: Youngest writer to be shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize. Pic by Indika Handuwala
The cross dimensional adventure Praveen wrote at 15- The Double Doorway- made the student of Colombo International School probably the youngest writer to be shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize – the prestigious award for creative writing in English.
Praveen, now 16, is grateful to his family- his lecturer/entrepreneur father Dr. Prasantha Jayamanna, mother Nalika and 14-year-old sister Prabhashi, also his teachers at the Colombo International School (CIS) who urged him to write a book. It was at school- in the whirlwind of the Model UN, the literature society and sports- that he met some of the people who metamorphose into the zany cohort in The Double Doorway.
The tale is set in an indeterminate place geographically (though you really won’t be thought paranoid if you locate it in suburban America). Jack is a 12-year-old who moves house with a single mother and a toddler sister- where a fresh adventure awaits in the form of a travel machine.
Praveen shows himself adept at hewing out his characters. Jack Carbuncle as narrator-protagonist has a somewhat goofy but winning way with him, and the mad scientist with DID who invents the machine is- in both his identities- quite the peppy villain. Together with two-year-old Mell they accidentally set off- to be caught between Blue Beard and Red Beard the pirates, manacled in royal dungeons and attacked by walking trees.
It is a very fast paced adventure on clean though inspired lines- for Praveen began writing with the basic framework clear in his mind. That he was building on an alien world- clearly spurred by American children’s fantasies- has robbed some immediacy and made things seem a bit generic but the imagination in the plot makes up for this.
This children’s novel is not all adrenaline-pumping world-hopping- there is a philosophical feel where all the worlds visited by the children are worlds fished from their own imaginations at the end. There is a lot to be read between the lines and Praveen, wittingly or not, has left an alternative, less-magical-than-metaphorical reading into the adventure that shimmers faintly on the surface like shot silver. The end- to leave no spoilers- is simply quite startling.
One can understand how the book could have made its way to a galaxy that has come to define what Sri Lankan writing in English should aspire to or, indeed, surpass.