|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Match
The brilliant first novel of Romesh Gunesekera dealt with lost innocence in the final years before the war. Since then, he has dealt with love, longing and loss, but the treatment you get in The Match is simply stirring. With two key cricket matches, the symbolism is unparalleled. The story is told through Sunny, whom we meet as a teenager growing up with his father, a Sri Lankan journalist turned public relations professional who moved to Manila to be part of the "free press" that had been promised before all the rapidly unfolding political events made it all fall apart. Sunny’s mother committed suicide (something he would discover much later) and growing up with a rather distant father, when it comes to showing affection, he is hungry to find out all about love. The first whiff of love appears and disappears in the form of a crush he has on the stunning Tina. It all unfolds at a cricket match, organised with a bunch of expatriates living in Manila. From there, things move on to London, where Sunny pretty much ambles along with his life, drops out of engineering, finds love in photography and love in the form of Clara. It is with her that he gets his share of the joys of fatherhood. Gunesekera’s prose sings, effortlessly at that when he tries to become more than the sum of all things that his father never was to him, to his son Mikey. It is from here that the deeper issues of being away in a home far away from home come to the fore and The Match draws you in for the journey to Sri Lanka. Sunny embarks on a voyage to the place of his birth and it turns out to be quite a discovery for him. Political parallels are subtly drawn. The chaos unfolding in Sri Lanka quietly shakes and stirs not just Sunny but the reader, too. But there is hope. Peace looms amidst the din and the violence. Like it happened in real life, you have the Norwegian peacekeepers at work and the Sri Lankan cricket team taking the game to "full decibel level" at the Oval where they clash with India. It is here that you witness the "possibility of a renewal", of an unsettled past coming to grips with the present to take on what could perhaps be an even more stunning future. Like all of his past work, The Match by Gunesekera is all of these things and a lot more—imagined evocatively. |
WHEN you get something
that gives you a mix of Manila, London and Sri Lanka with a heady dose
of cricket thrown in, you’ve got me hooked. If it comes from the
award-winning author of Monkfish Moon, Reef, Heaven’s
Edge and The Sandglass, it’s more than enough reason to
stay up all night.