The shades of night

REVIEW: Yasmine Gooneratne's latest novel, The Sweet and Simple Kind, was a fascinating read. I plan to write a more literary review of the book later, but I would like to raise here a few general issues, in looking at its principal theme as a subject of the social and political commentary that forms the substance of this column.

The book is divided into four parts, which move from what seems a childhood idyll to a shattered world in which many of the protagonists have emigrated.

The most distinguished of these is the Professor of English at Peradeniya University, Van Loten, a scarcely disguised Lyn Ludowyk who did in fact leave Sri Lanka during the social changes of the fifties, in anticipation perhaps of the traumas that these changes led to in the race riots of 1958.

More moving is the emigration of Paula and Rajan Phillips, the school teachers who had inspired the heroine of the novel, Latha Wijesinha, to go to Peradeniya in the first place, to read English.

The Phillipses seem to be portraits of Pauline and Dick Hensman, similarly a Burgher-Tamil combination that had revitalised the teaching of English in schools during that period, having been inspired themselves by Van Loten/Ludowyk.

The Hensmans had helped bring out the innovative journal Commentary during the fifties, copies of which were given to me by Shelagh Goonewardene (another of Pauline's Bishop's College products who had gone on to do English under Ludowyk at Peradeniya), when she herself finally went abroad in the eighties.

The Hensmans had gone away long before, shortly after the 1958 riots, but then they came back to Sri Lanka in the eighties after they had retired - which meant they had to face the worst renewal of ethnic violence in 1983.

I had tried, I remember, to involve the Hensmans in some literary programmes at the British Council, having been told by Jeanne Pinto about their brilliance as lecturers.

My strongest memory of Dick however is his bitter resignation after the 1983 riots, when he was quite convinced, long before I was myself, of the exalted range of those involved in the conspiracy.

Fortunately he did not go away again, and even more fortunately his daughter has involved herself in the type of incisive analysis, on socio-political issues, that her parents introduced to so many young people half a century ago.

Latha Wijesinha herself went off to Cambridge shortly after the riots, anxious to get away after she began to understand the involvement of her relations in unsavoury activities.

The Wijesinhas in the novel, quite unlike any Wijesinhas in real life, are extremely rich and politically very successful, with Kandyan aristocratic connections that culminate in a female Prime Minister.

Indeed, they seem to be intended to call to mind the Bandaranaikes, though there aren't any characters that are based directly on real ones, as with Van Loten or the Phillipses or, to cite another obvious portrait, the artist van Kuyk who paints sensuous pictures and lives in a Kandyan village with a devoted former maidservant.

Latha, in a not entirely convincing note of optimism to end the novel, comes back to Sri Lanka in the early sixties, while firmly resisting the attempt of her aunt by marriage, the lady Prime Minister, to marry her off to the most villainous of the book's villains.

More realistic is the fate of her cousin Tsunami, the tempestuous child, 'an earthquake waiting to happen', who seems initially to embody an iconoclastic idealism that the author underwrites. One anticipates a high spirited response from her to fate, whether successful or not.

On the contrary, how she is borne down by the relentless pressures of her family to conform, so that she can only free herself by leaving the country entirely, constitutes perhaps the saddest personal tragedy in a book full of the wholesale collapse of ideals.

Despite the wit and sparkle then, sometimes bordering even on slapstick (the Prime Minister wants Latha to turn a blind eye to her husband's little piccadillies, while admiring the 'broad, khaki-clad shoulders' of a military aide - 'Good bod, no?' said Her Excellency'), the novel is essentially tragic in its vision.

It embodies throughout the deadening impact of public pressures to conform, along with private privileging of self-indulgence.

And going along with both these urges is the othering of those who are different, an insistence on exclusivist identities that restricts access to benefits.

Traditions are created to preserve and enhance status, and principles are freely abandoned in the name of other principles that need neither to be explained nor even understood.

Rowland Wijesinha, Christian ADC to a British Governor, thus becomes a proponent of majoritarian communalism, though in the end he falls victim to forces he helps create but of course cannot control.

Yasmine Gooneratne, herself a Bandaranaike, is sharp then in her critique of the social changes of the fifties over which her kinsman seemed to preside, but she also shows that the negative aspects of those changes were rooted in deeper flaws in society.

There is no easy attribution of blame to particular segments of society, for her analysis - or rather her impressionistic assessment - shows the involvement of many different levels in the disintegration of a once cohesive - or apparently cohesive - society.

I am not sure, given the distance of the time about which she writes, and the many changes that have happened since, that we can draw significant parallels.

However, understanding the past is always helpful in trying to analyse the present and work towards a better future.

Certainly, the presentation in the book of the pettiness of so many motives, and the incapacity of those affected to assess themselves, suggests that extending our horizons may help to at least think more productively about where we should be heading.