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His early life encompassed Sri Lanka, Manila, and Liverpool. Judith Palmer talks to Romesh Gunesekera about culture clashes, collecting and cricket
LIFE has hereby delivered an able exposition of the themes of Romesh Gunesekera's new novel: the significance of good timing, the frailty of verbal communication, the ramifications of cutting yourself off, and the importance of knowing what to hang on to and what to let go. In a series of episodes from 1970 to 2002, The Match (Bloomsbury, `A314.99) follows the fortunes of Sunny, a Sri Lankan expatriate, from the fug of his teenage bedroom in Manila, wrapped up in centrefold fantasies, minor self-abuse and filial contempt; through his lonely student days in London; and the drift into uncommunicative middle age as father to his own teenage son. "The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong," says Gunesekera. "That's the big reversal in this book. In a sense you begin to learn from your youngers. It makes me think of the story of Auden revising the poems of his youth. The revisions of a young man's poems by an old man is completely the wrong way round." Like Sunny, Gunesekera was born in Colombo, and moved to the Philippines with his father in the 1960s; he travelled to the UK to study, and went on to make London his home. "There, the similarities end," he maintains. He was, he says, the only child he knew who had seen television: "I had that sense of being very different because I’d seen things I couldn't really articulate or tell people about. That felt very strange. As years have passed, partly because of the books, I've felt more and more at home in Sri Lanka. I have almost a role there and a place from where I can try to understand or look at it." His previous fictions had all been rooted, one way or another, in Sri Lanka: the spellbinding Booker-shortlisted novel, The Reef, with its elegiac reminiscences of culinary magic in an abandoned homeland; the nine shimmering short stories of Monkfish Moon; the lush and war-torn Eden of Heaven's Edge. For the first time, in The Match, he begins to explore the terrain of his teenage years: suburban life among the international execs and whiskey-swilling journos in Marcos's pre-dictatorship Philippines. Lester, Sunny's father, had come to Manila in order to work as a journalist in 1967. When the novel begins, words have begun to fail him. He is no longer able to communicate with his son. The generation gap is briefly bridged with the formation of an inter-generational cricket team, for a single momentous match, played out on a makeshift pitch on a golf course. Gunesekera’s father left Ceylon to start an Asian development bank, like another of the characters in The Match, and many of the closest family friends were journalists. "I had a sense of people working with words from an early age," he says. "As a youngster I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer." In Manila he started scribbling down poems and stories to share aloud with his teenage buddies. "I was completely besotted with the Beat writers," he says. Brought up bilingually, speaking Sinhala and English, Gunesekera has only ever written in English. "I liked English more," he explains, "partly because I only read books in English. That's part of colonial history as well." In the novel, after false starts as an engineer and an accounts clerk, Sunny settles into a low-key career as a photographer. He lives his life in waiting; never quite giving up hope of experiencing, and capturing on film, the perfect moment. "There’s an element of that comes into writing: trying to do the impossible and capture the moment," says Gunesekera. "I have a sense of time passing, and that’s my urge to write—the sense of cheating time—of getting out of the grip of time. Faulkner used to talk about writing being like scratching a mark on the wall of oblivion. If you didn't believe that was possible, there wouldn't be a story or a book." Gunesekera does take lots of photographs, he admits, and like Sunny, he does have a fascination with old cameras. Is he a collector? Does the desire to capture a moment spill out into a desire to gather other precious things to him? He's a hoarder, he says, mainly of clippings unsystematically snipped from newspapers. "Funnily enough, my name is meant to mean that. 'Gunesekera' broken down means 'collector of good things'." The chronological episodes dividing up the text are significant not just in the characters’ personal histories, but in the history of Sri Lanka. The novel's penultimate chapter marks the year 1996—which in Sri Lankan terms means two things: the horrific bombings in Colombo, and the triumph of the Sri Lankan cricket team over Australia in the final of the cricket World Cup. Not a cricket buff, Gunesekera nonetheless realised he wanted to write something which tapped into the cricketing drama. "It's been the other side of the Sri Lankan experience," he says. "The more positive one." The Match concludes in 2002: the year of the ceasefire, which halted three decades of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka that has claimed in excess of 64,000 lives. With the recent upswell of violence, and the need for a new set of peace talks in Geneva, does Gunesekera feel he ended the novel too soon? "Chasing the perfect is a very rich vein to explore philosophically," he says. "It's almost a refrain through the book of whether perfection itself is a temporary thing, and whether you have to accept that." — By arrangement with The Independent |
