Sequence of a bygone life dot by dot, shade by shade

The Sweet and Simple Kind, by Yasmine Gooneratne.
Perera Hussein Publishing House, Rs. 1,000 – all bookshops. www.ph-books.com.
Reviewed by - Robert Egeter-van Kuyk

Somewhere in my audiovisual documents collection there is an old footage from Ceylon in 1926 showing traditional freight barges making their stately progress down the river to Colombo harbour, where three-masters and the odd coal-fired steamship wait for them. The pace is slow but determined; the ships wait patiently but know what they wait for. Just around the left hand corner you see a glimpse of what could be the entrance of the canal to Beira Lake. The streets look relaxed. It is a brief sequence of shots, yet it more than suggests a bygone Ceylon.

Yasmine Gooneratne’s new book reminded me of that footage for various reasons. She presents the reader with a sequence of shots, albeit written, which summarises the bygone Ceylon of between 1935 and 1963 (apart from the brief introductory chapter) – between the days of harmony and innocence, and those when certified bigotry, monumental ignorance and dedicated ill will started a process of social and human degeneration - though the powers of decency and level-headed judgement, of true social commitment and generosity, still manned the outer walls of the Fort and of Fort.

‘Arrogance is one inch from the abyss’, goes a Dutch saying. And Yasmine defines the many faces of that arrogance, and shows us that one inch before the edge of the abyss. Not by verbose theory, but by illustrating how it works out in the hearts and minds of Ceylonese in various walks of life in those days. Why does the drum sound? Because it is empty, and the bigger its emptiness, the louder its boom. Sometimes touching public speeches, exquisite saris, expensive parties and promises to improve the people (or the roads) – as some of the book’s protagonists demonstrate – are like billboards in the countryside: when you look behind them, you only see a tired dog sleeping.

Yet dawn sets in, in Yasmine’s novel, from the very start, irrevocably because it comes after the dark. The power of the sweet and the simple may seem to break down in a natural tsunami, but in Tsunami (and Latha and Herbert and Chris and Soma and Anupam and Sujit, and many more), it shows that it cannot be deleted. I don’t know if Yasmine’s description of these 30 years in Ceylonese life is accurate; having arrived in the country in 1971, I have only witnessed the tail end of that period. And enjoyed it, and since then heard much about it. But I am not qualified to judge.

I am not qualified either to say something intelligent about the structure of this novel or about its language, except – and I am sure I share this feeling with many readers – that Yasmine’s tongue in cheek asides have on me still the same effect as when we first met (in ’71), and since I am not a native English speaker I may be excused I hope when I say that many an aside has had its effect one or two pages later! It is like drinking whisky and soda: the first time you enjoy the taste in the soda water, later on it comes home to you. And I like my whisky, not to mention arrack and soda.

Yasmine’s book also reminds me of that old film footage I mentioned because I feel it is what they call a roman fleuve. A novel that is like a river.

You push your little boat into the stream and it takes you along the banks with its many hues of green and yellow, the colours of fruits and flowers and birds and butterflies, a river that takes you downstream because you started upstream, and does not require you to navigate by satellite or have your gun ready against crocs. This may be a 19th century kind of story telling, but in my view it is still a very good and a convincing one.

And finally some technique. The old film shows images because minuscule parts of silver are disposed in such a way that they show pictures. Like an old photograph. In her novel, Yasmine uses, in my view, an effective sort of pointillisme – that painting technique used by Seurat and Pissarro. It means that you use little dots of colour to compose a picture, much as our new flat-screens with their pixels. The personae in Yasmine’s book are sometimes described in great detail (including the artist who’s been given my surname); dot by dot, shade by shade, she gives one more detail to complement the picture. It is not always clear initially what the added value would be, but then, in real life it is rarely clear in advance what the practical use of some details that are given to us, could be. Do we really need all of them? Do we wish a surfeit of details to cloud our view of the general picture? Those in Yasmine’s novel make their point (pun not intended) eventually.

I do not need to recommend this book. Obviously it is already on your shopping list.

The writer worked for the United Nations in Sri Lanka, later as head of Public Information and Audiovisual Collections at the Dutch Government Information Service. He publishes poetry since 1974, and more recently co-authored a book on the history of the Dutch period in Ceylon 1640-1796