The day I began reading “Noontide Toll”, the latest novel by the Booker-nominated author Romesh Gunesekera, Sri Lanka turns over a happy milestone.
The popular rail service known as the “Queen of Jaffna” — linking the capital Colombo with the northern city of Jaffna — reopens after a 24-year hiatus. There are celebrations across Sri Lanka at the renewed hope of normalcy returning to the island ravaged by war.
It’s a happy coincidence — turning the first pages of a book dealing with post-war Sri Lanka and the symbolic resumption of the vital train link between north and south.
What’s not so happy is the civil war and its violent aftermath the emerald island has witnessed in those 24 years — a period that occupies most of the Colombo-born Gunesekera’s fictional landscape.
“With ‘Noontide Toll’, I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story,” Gunesekera says of the theme and format of his sixth book, in an interview with Weekend Review in Sharjah. He is in the emirate to participate at the Sharjah International Book Fair.
“But I didn’t want it to be the kind of novel where you spend four years playing around with the form and finally publish it,” he continues. “There’s something in ‘Noontide Toll’ where it looks at the future and says where are we going — so time was a critical element for writing a book on Sri Lanka now. I wanted this episodic novel to come out sooner than later — this is a book where I want the reader to confront the present reality all the time, and not the back story.”
The vision of how political and personal catastrophes change the course of human destiny is a cornerstone of Gunesekera’s art, often expressed through dream-like landscapes and a poetic voice set in fictional islands. But “Noontide Toll” is hardly about a dream — it’s more about vignettes from a nation trying to reconcile with a nightmare that’s just ended.
“The culture of the world is changing so fast — I do want people to be able to see the reflection of the reality which is there in Sri Lanka now and which might be gone in one or two years,” Gunesekera says.
Born in 1954, Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines before moving to England in 1971. His first book, Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories on ethnic and political strife in Sri Lanka, was published in 1992 to critical acclaim. His second book and his first novel Reef was published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
On the day we meet in Sharjah, Gunesekera has been to the American University of Sharjah earlier for a conference with students. “At the AUS, there was this girl who said that a lot of her friends can be characterised as global persons — born somewhere and living somewhere else. She was surprised to discover that my life was like that way back in the 1950s and 1960s,” he says.
So how was it like for someone to grow up in three countries in the first 17 years?
“At that time it was a bit unusual. But it is the way a lot of people are beginning to live, and it’s not only the rich. Because of migrant labour, because people are on the move all the time, a huge part of the global population now has the experience of growing up in one place and living in a very different place,” says Gunesekera.
“I guess what struck me is that in my generation in the 1950s and 1960s, you do find a lot of people who ended up as writers with this sort of a background. This might have something to do with carrying your own little world with you — the world of imagination and the books that you are reading. You don’t feel you are in a completely alien place because you continue to read the books that you usually do,” says Gunesekera of his time growing up as an expatriate child in the Philippines and a teenager in London, where he currently lives.
But then comes the caveat.
“I travelled a lot more than that sketchy biography on Wikipedia suggests,” he muses. “I first went to England when I was four years old — I went by ship on a journey not very different than what’s described by [Canadian author] Michael Ondatje in his recent novel ‘The Cats Table’ — It might have been the same ship, I can’t remember now,” he chuckles. “I’ve actually been out of kilter with my environment for a long time. When I was growing up, I don’t think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.”
He attributes that experience to a combination of luck and enterprise, the latter by his father, who was instrumental in setting up the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with its headquarters in Manila.
“I was very lucky — it wasn’t a question of being wealthy, my father was just extremely lucky with the couple of jobs he got. So we got a chance to travel when nobody else could travel. The generation before that used to travel if they were wealthy, but in the 1950s, it wasn’t so easy and in the 1960s it was almost impossible.”
But the Gunesekera family’s relocation to Manila was also not without its share of drama.
“It was the 1960s and my father was involved in the development banking world and they decided to set up the ADB. It was just pure chance that it ended up in the Philippines. I think one of the earlier suggestions was Tehran, so I could have grown up in Tehran for all you know,” he says. “So I grew up with a sense of the wider world — I knew it was there and that affected me.”
It was this sense of a wider world that Gunesekera says ultimately fuelled his ambitions as a writer.
“I’ve met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation. I realised around this time that I wanted to become a writer. And when I was about 18, I really wanted to write books.”
But with Gunesekera’s late teens came the promise (or perhaps threat) of a flourishing career in journalism, thanks in part to the inspiration from his father’s friends.
“My father seemed to have the best time when he was with his journalist friends. So in the end, when people asked me about my career plans, I said I wanted to become a journalist. But I never did anything serious about it. I guess I did an internship with a newspaper and wrote a piece about coconut trees or something, but that was about it!
“My father and his friends belonged to a generation where whether they studied literature or not, they knew poetry and literature. I found that quite amazing. I thought that when these people were at their most inspired best, they would go to literature — there was a power there that they would plug in to and I wanted to be a part of it too.”
That power began manifesting during Gunesekera’s early time in England, when he says he began experimenting with magic realism after an inspiring reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“I had started and almost finished one novel — a magic realist novel inspired by Marquez — because all of us at that age and time would have discovered Marquez. When I confessed to my father that I really didn’t want to be a journalist but a writer, he told me to read someone like Marquez, to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Anyone who read that ended up thinking that was the only way to write,” he says.
However, his natural instinct as a writer soon intervened. “But I thought when I was going to write a book, it was going to be as different as possible from that kind of writing,” he says. “So came ‘Monkfish Moon’, a collection of short stories — very precise that looked at the world in a non-magic realist way.”
Asked about how “Monkfish Moon” fit into his journey as a writer, he chuckles: “Well, one hopes that’s really a journey and not a regression.”
But the circularity is obvious — “Monkfish Moon” was a collection of stories, and so is “Noontide Toll”. “When I was writing ‘Monkfish Moon’ I had certain things in my head — this idea that in your mental life you have a map of the world created out of what you read. And it’s a multidimensional map. One where for me, for instance, I knew of Tagore and India and Tolstoy ... When I did read more seriously as a teenager, there were very big parts of this mental map on which England was there — though I read more of American literature, specially the south. And of course people like Marquez. So, with ‘Monkfish Moon’ what I wanted was to recreate not so much of Sri Lanka, but a tropical island which wasn’t, lets say, Trinidad. I had no idea I would write a novel.”
The public and critical success of “Monkfish Moon” ensured that Gunesekera never looked back. With his next book and first novel “Reef” came grander success — a Booker nomination.
“With ‘Reef’, my desire was not the book that I wrote at all. I think the book that I wanted to write would have had its roots in Beckett or something antithetical to naturalist writing. After ‘Reef’, I decided I could write more novels which could be bigger, but not huge. I also thought with each book to do something different — with ‘Sandglass’ I thought I wanted more characters and different texture to the book. So each book draws something from the previous one but each also is a reaction to the previous one.”
Memory and undercurrents of violence are recurring themes in Gunesekera’s works, as are the endless possibilities offered in a journey — be it in “Prisoner of Paradise” or “Heaven’s Edge” or “Noontide Toll”.
The pronounced metaphysical lines from American author Jack Kerouac that preface “Noontide Toll” — “There was nowhere to go, so keep on rolling under the stars” — recall T. S. Eliot’s lines from the “Four Quartets”: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless/ Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is/ But neither arrest nor movement.”
This still point of the turning world is perhaps reflective of Gunesekera’s journey as a writer.
More than 20 years after his first collection of short stories was published, Gunesekera returns to his origins with his newest collection.
“With Noontide Toll, I didn’t want to be restricted by the idea that the novel is something and the short story is something else, in matters of form. You can do anything you want with a novel and a short story, but I think people are still incredibly conservative despite all the avant garde creativity going on around us,” he says. “But I also wanted this collection to have a beginning and an end, with a journey in between. People just don’t look at a famous novel like ‘Clarissa’ [by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748] and say that it’s a collection of letters! It’s the form that makes a book and makes it a novel — so that was one of the challenges with ‘Noontide Toll’.”
And with his immense experience and observation of the situation in Sri Lanka for decades, what does he make of its future?
“I don’t think anyone knows where it’s headed — I’m with Vasantha, the neutral narrator of ‘Noontide Toll’, on this,” he says.
“Undoubtedly, there’s no war hanging over your head and that’s a great benefit. But there are things from the earlier war hanging over the country which are not very nice and aren’t going to go away. I am not an economist, but there are huge infrastructure projects going and lots of globalised work going on, there’s a lot of exploitation going on and there’s a lot of debt the country is into. On the political side, elections are due next year. Even in the brief life of Vasantha as a fictional creature, things change so much ... There are obviously a lot of unresolved issues — of rights, the economy, minorities — which could go one way or the other, and that’s quite apart from what started the business of the war anyway, which was about the way society was organised.”
So does that mean it’s a verdict for positive growth in the future?
Gunesekera offers some sobering context: “There are lots of young Sri Lankan writers starting out who are trying to work out how to deal with the reality they are living in, where there are obviously consequences when you say the wrong things. It has been like that for some time, not just under the present regime. So I thought how do you deal with such sort of things? You deal with them the way Vasantha does — which is fairly transparent at one level, and a kind of black comedy at another level. When he needs to show something that will be difficult, there will be something comic coming out.”
After a brief pause, he says: “But the future of Sri Lanka is a little uncertain at the moment. These things just keep turning around.”
