Ashok Ferrey is by no means a typical Sri Lankan, for he has spent a good chunk of his life in England, Western Europe and Africa. He lives in Colombo 7 and his social network as well as his worldview is very cosmopolitan. The process of natural selection operates in both the physical and the social environment.
Someday, Sri Lanka’s suave cosmopolitan elite will give way to a vernacular elite that is characterized by its jingoistic worldview and its highly ambivalent attitude towards time-honoured values such as justice, impartiality, honesty, integrity, and uprightness. In fact this is already happening with the westernized elite – the customary custodians of democracy – finding itself perilously close to extinction.
Thus, in the current socio-political context, Ferrey could be viewed as a marginalized Sri Lankan – an “alien”, if you will. He is part of a dying breed that simply cannot comprehend what is going on in this country, such as the breakdown of law and order, the politicization of administrative and legal institutions, and the collapse of a system of values and beliefs espoused by every right-minded citizen. This is a very important point because his sense of alienation has a significant bearing on his writing.
Ferrey was obviously an angry and disgruntled man when he wrote “Serendipity” given the undercurrents of shock and despair that constantly ripple though the novel. Life in Colombo, according to Ferrey, is full of laughter and horror mixed in equal proportions.
Make no mistake, his novel, cloaked in satire, carries a deadly serious message: that with the dog-eat-dog philosophy seeping into every nook and cranny of our social superstructure, we are heading down the path of no return.
I regard “Serendipity” as Sri Lanka’s first absurd novel (in the context of creative writing in English) and if Ferrey were not an alien but a typical Sri Lankan, I do not think he could have produced this literary masterpiece.
The novel is full of strange characters and bizarre situations.
One might ask, “Who is a typical Sri Lankan?” This is like asking, “Who is a typical Englishman?” It’s a tough question.
“Serendipity” is set in Colombo in the mid-eighties (a year or two after the infamous communal riots of July 1983 perhaps) – a period characterized by violent ethnic conflict, lawlessness, gross human rights violations, suppression of press freedom, and extreme political patronage.
The law of the jungle prevails: each man for himself and the winner take all.
All the ingredients are there for a mind-blowing absurd novel and what Ashok Ferrey produces with remarkable sleight of hand is exactly that.
Is the novel relevant to the Sri Lanka of today? Indeed it is, for despite having eradicated terrorism, we are burrowing deeper into the same black hole instead of emerging into the sunlight and undergoing a healthy metamorphosis, as from caterpillar to butterfly.
“Serendipity” is about cultural decay and moral decadence and the manner in which the author satirizes the logic of conventional morality through the illogical behaviour of his characters is simply marvellous. The novel is full of startling literary devices.
Ferrey is by far the funniest Sri Lankan writer around. If you haven’t yet read “Serendipity”, beware: it is so funny, you could die laughing.
What distinguishes this writer from other Sri Lankan writers is his breezy and sardonic style of writing and clever (or should I say devious?) use of language to make the reader laugh out loud.
It is not Singlish, for sure, as there is a touch of the King’s English in his lush, lyrical prose. Yet, it has a distinct local flavour which is richer than any spice grown in this island.
The author departs from conventional fiction by cheerfully flouting the rule that a novel should have a well-constructed plot or storyline. Another rule he ignores is that a novel should portray the kind of characters that one encounters in real life (unless of course it is dealing with imaginary creatures).
He also borrows from other traditions such as abstract art and surrealism by not attempting to represent a recognizable external reality and relying instead on the use of linguistic colour, form, shape and texture to express the central theme of his novel (implied), which is that life is incoherent, incomprehensible, and utterly absurd.
In short, that the world we (Sri Lankans) live in today does not make sense. Ferrey’s novel is kaleidoscopic and asymmetrical.
The style, as much as the content, is nightmarish and feverish. Packed with dialogue, almost the entire book is a compulsive performance piece.
The characters are by and large “unreal” and perform seemingly unmotivated acts. The most senseless act of all occurs at the very end, and it comes as a real shocker because the person who commits the atrocity is our heroine, Piyumi, who absolutely abhors violence of any kind. What an ingenious way to end the novel and lend credence to the author’s thesis (implied) that life is, indeed, utterly meaningless and absurd.
It is very interesting to note that the leading female characters (Piyumi, Debs, Evangeline) have dominant personalities and masculine traits while the leading male characters (Marek, Viraj) have passive personalities and feminine traits. The writer therefore dispenses with gender stereotypes in favour of grotesque gender imagery.
Wittingly or unwittingly Ferrey has written his first novel in an abstract expressionistic style that seeks to express emotions rather than external realities, with particular emphasis on the spontaneous creative act.
Thus the novel is more concerned with the immediate subjective experience than with objective phenomena. Expressionism is concerned almost exclusively with the inner world of emotions, often incorporating violence and the grotesque. If we care to view “Serendipity” through an expressionistic lens, we will see it in a new light. |
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