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Book review:
In the same boat
The book is small, 62 pages and easy to read. I like these
Lilliputians against the block busters of five hundred plus pages. Time
has become a hard sought commodity for everyone and reading long stories
is a difficult hurdle. In the same boat is presented well by publishers
Perera and Hussein who currently rates high in the book business.
Channa Wickremasekara’s subject is relevant, about people who pay
everything they have and get into a ramshackle boat placing their lives
and hopes in the hands of those who are often questionable in character.
Present day news has boat people stories frequently even though
peripheral.
Then came the rest, among them the ‘Mayflower’ clan across the
Atlantic and Fidel and Che who sailed on the ‘Granma’ from the Tuxpan
River along the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba. Thousand others followed, ones
who fled ‘this’ despot and ‘that’ regime to go anyplace offering them
refuge. Of course among the chosen twelve there would have been a thief
or two as the Bard said referring to a jury.
The boat stories are mainly from the third world. No Lief Ericson
today would leave the shores of Scandinavia and go down under to find a
new home. It is people with Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ label who
hit the headlines from time to time, caught offshore trying to enter
their imaginary Valhalla. It is about self exiled sufferers from poverty
riddled beginnings collecting all their hopes and dreams in one package
and giving it everything they got to cross oceans looking for salvation.
That is author Channa’s theme and he has done justice. The people
description is simple and effective, from ‘Red Cap’ who runs the show to
the occupants of the boat down to a little girl who took her little
kitten onboard gives us a variety of character caricatures. There are no
names and no countries mentioned. That is great, deprives some political
‘know all’ idiot to take hypocritical offense on the book. Gives harp
carrying, halo wearing lily-white souls a thought or two to think about.
Channa is only addressing a common calamity people face in desperation
and of the professional predators who devour them unmercifully at every
turn which at times sadly includes the loss of lives.
That is all he has written, no frills and fancy rhetoric. He has not
fattened the pages with what rags the people wore or how blue the sea
was or how a lonely gull flew around the mast and settled on the boom.
There is no clandestine Romeo and Juliet romance on the boat. The author
has stuck to the script and avoided the unnecessary and the end he has
created is unexpected and cleverly written.
That is what the book is all about.
In the same boat is an easy read with a deeper meaning that I
enjoyed.
- Capt Elmo
Jayawardena
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