A fictional journey that links Colombo, Manila and London
Daniel Alarcn, associate editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta
Negra and author of the novel "Lost City Radio" reviews Romesh
Gunesekera's latest novel The Match, just published in the US, for the
Washington Post.
Romesh Gunesekera's "The Match" opens in Manila in the 1970s, still
the relatively early days of Ferdinand Marcos's presidency. It is a time
of great optimism, and the suggestively named Sunny Fernando has come to
the Philippines with his recently widowed father, a Sri Lankan
journalist, to start anew.
The novel's first section centers on Sunny's ordinary adolescent
concerns - friends, girls, school, music - until another Sri Lankan
family arrives with Tina, their fetching teenage daughter, and the
growing expatriate community organizes a cricket match.
Early in the novel, cricket becomes a proxy through which to discuss
the legacy of colonialism, the new Asia and hope for Sri Lanka, among
other issues. As for the action, it flits by. The cricket match is
described in great detail, ending quite dramatically, but its pleasures
soon are overwhelmed by a dark revelation about the death of Sunny's
mother.
Golden moment
A golden moment has passed, and in the years after the match, the
expat community slowly disbands: One player ends up in rehab; Tina and
her family move to the United States; the Marcos regime turns despotic
and barbarous.
As for Sunny, he moves to London to study engineering. Once there, he
pairs up with an Englishwoman named Clara, has a child and becomes a
photographer. From that point on, "The Match" becomes a bland snapshot
of middle-class English domestic life.
The novel's arc, spanning 3 1/2 decades and very disparate worlds -
Colombo, Manila, London and back again - seems to display a certain
ambition: a globalized novel for this post-Sept. 11 world, a tapestry of
stories about those of us who don't ever feel completely at home
anywhere.
It wouldn't be accurate to say that "The Match" is a novel about
politics, though the horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war, a conflict
that has claimed nearly 70,000 lives since it began in 1983, do form the
novel's dim backdrop.
Elsewhere, most notably in his critically acclaimed 1994 novel
"Reef," a Booker Prize finalist, Gunesekera has tackled the ruinous
violence plaguing his native country.
Here, however, he presents another side of the story: the emotional
cost of exile, the narcotizing comfort of drifting away from a history
of violence. Sunny is not directly affected by the great drama of
nations - political unrest, ethnic conflict, extreme violence. These lie
dormant, only now and then slinking onto center stage. Instead, we watch
Sunny float, without any real effort or conviction, away from his past.
Character
When suicide bombers kill a minor character we've only just met, the
man's passing is noted in a scant line or two. We don't feel it, and if
Sunny does, it is only in the most diffuse way: one more layer to his
anomie, as ill-defined as it is ever-present.
The success of a novel like this depends on a reader's willingness to
accept Sunny's laconic, untethered perspective. Some may enjoy it; I
found it off-putting. We read a great deal but learn very little about
Gunesekera's protagonist. For a photographer, he has a rather
unconvincing relationship with the visual world.
No place ever comes alive, and only a few characters manage to. Of
Colombo, our intrepid photographer takes only "pictures of buildings,
cars, birds. Kids playing cricket." Manila, too, merits hardly a glance:
When Sunny returns for his father's funeral, we learn only that the
Philippine capital "had changed since Sunny's early days."
How it changed is apparently beyond the purview of this book.
Gunesekera's writing is uneven at best.
In one scene, Sunny and Clara discover their love for one another
with a preposterous, lightning-strike quality usually reserved for
overproduced Hollywood romances. The author purrs: "The right words, at
the right time, in the right place, were like a key turning in a lock.
His heart, and hers, opened."
This facile rendering of human emotion is frankly depressing to read,
and moments like this are sprinkled everywhere throughout this
remarkably unsubtle novel. Sunny visits a clockmaker and feels time
stand still.
In England, Sunny is poured his first Guinness, and we are subjected
to a commercial-in-prose extolling the edifying pleasures of a good
stout ("This is a drink that teaches you patience.").
In the end, it is the accumulated effect of this sort of writing that
sinks the novel. Sunny Fernando has, in theory at least, an interesting
story to tell, but Gunesekera has written a solipsistic coming-of-age
story, daring us to watch this boy grow into a not-very-interesting man.
As "The Match" progresses, it is increasingly difficult to believe that
Sunny cares very much about any of the things we are assured he holds
dear.
He is a photographer who never bothers to look closely, a son haunted
by the ghost of a mother he never really thinks about, a supposedly
devoted cricket fan who exists happily without his beloved game for the
better part of three decades. All of which makes a reader wonder: If the
protagonist can't be bothered, why should we?
For the Washington Post |