As befits a philosophy graduate from Columbia, the novel opens with a contemplation of the notion of time and its elusive nature, before introducing us to Krishan and his home life in Colombo with his mother and aging grandmother.
There are apparently currently about three million Sri Lankan Tamils, of whom nearly half reside outside Sri Lanka, and it is this diaspora Arudpragasam identifies as being part of. Throughout the novel, Krishan, the protagonist is not just a Sri Lankan, but a Tamil Sri Lankan, who does not identify with the Sinhalese Sri Lankan parts of his country. That said, the protagonist is depicted as a patriot, in his love and commitment to Sri Lanka and in his lyrical rendering of the landscapes of his country:
For most of his life, he had visualized when he thought of the northeast, wide landscapes of salt flat and palmyra trees, the copper-coloured dirt roads of the Vanni and the hard, dry earth that made up most of the peninsula, and the piercing, lilting rhythms of devotional music rising up from temples during festival season, the sound of people speaking their untainted Tamil loudly and musically, without restraint. These images had filled him with a sense of freedom, with the possibility of living a life radically different from his own, but they had been suffused with the same time with a dream-like quality that made it hard to think about them in any concrete way…
p18
The novel goes on to represent the point of view of Sri Lankan Tamils as a minority race, and sympathetically represents the LTTE and other similar organisations as inevitable outcomes in the attempt at self-empowerment of a people who have felt they had lost control of their lives.
The actual storyline is very simple and happens in a short space of time: Krishan receives a phonecall which informs him that his grandmother’s carer, Rani, while on a visit home to her village, has fallen into a well and died. He is invited for the funeral, so he takes the train north to Kilinochchi. Krishan is on a literal as well as emotional-psychological journey; the travel brings up memories of other journeys in his past, particularly that of his relationship with Anjum, a free-spirited and community-oriented girl he met in India. At one stage of the train journey from Colombo to the north, Krishan had just passed through Anuradhapura district,
the last major Sinhala town before the north
p161
Through such little casual thoughts, we see how Krishan’s mind and worldview keeps dividing up his country into the Sinhala and Tamil parts; indeed, Krishan seems to be incessantly aware of his racial identity, race colouring many of his perceptions and interpretations.
He’d never actually travelled anywhere in the North Central Province, always having associated that part of the country with ancient Buddhist temples and ruins, places he not only had no interested in but generally went out of his way to try to avoid. Growing up he’d associated Buddhism mainly with the Sri Lankan government and army, with the statues they constructed all over the country to remind Muslims, Tamils, and other minorities of their place […]
p181
Krishan is not unlike Arudpragasam himself, in being a privileged, well educated young Tamil Sri Lankan man, of the elite of Colombo, and passages which indicate Krishan’s sense of guilt at being distanced from the conflict and suffering of other Tamil Sri Lankans in the North and East during the civil war, may well partly also speak for the author as much as the protagonist. In an interview in Guernica, Arudprasagam explains he was born and raised in Colombo, almost entirely educated in English, and his parents transitioned from being middle-classed to being the urban elite, “a community I have a lot of hatred towards because of its elitism” (Guernica).
The sense of not-quite-belonging while yearning to embrace his country, pervades this novel which is mostly a study in introspection of this one young Tamil man. Arudpragasam said his first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was written out of guilt, whereas this one,
It’s about masturbation, basically, this novel. Not in a crude way, or in the way that Philip Roth would write about it. It’s an exploration of desire and yearning. […] It’s interested in questions of desire—what is desire; what is the difference between desire and yearning; what is the connection between the inside and the outside, the imaginary and the real
The Paris Review
The writing style is assured, confident, flowing, even riveting. The author is inclined to very long sentences, liking to explain every musing to its nth degree. The novel goes off at many junctures into reveries and contemplations, frequently detouring quite a distance from the storyline to philosophise about various issues, though never in a dull way, nor ever losing the narrative thread. There tends to be a lot more telling than showing, but Arudpragasam is a good enough writer so that this is not necessarily a drawback. However, he does indulge himself in reveries, for instance, in a passage which contemplated the power of the gaze, how people look at each other, the power and imposition and so on of this gaze, spans 7 pages, right in the middle of a narrative about how he and Anjum first got together on their way home together from a party. Arudpragasam’s narrative tends to be full of such eddies, and while each is interesting, they do rather go on a little. “The supreme gift of an artist is the knowledge of when to stop” (Arthur Conan Doyle). A more experienced writer would say a little less and leave something to the imagination of the reader; whereas Arudprasagam is the type of author who wants to ensure he really has sucked the very marrow out of every bone before moving on. That said, a reader’s patience with such narrative eddies will not be unrewarded, as Arudpragasam manages to ensure coherence and flow even as he weaves in these over-long musings.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Arudpragasam explains that this digressive style is deliberate. He brings up repeatedly in interviews the Robert Musil book he seems to much admire, The Man without Qualities:
He [Musil] has these long, digressive, essayistic sections in his book, which I haven’t read since I was twenty, so I don’t know how I’d feel about it now. At the time I was very moved by the way he places philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation.
The Paris Review
Arudpragasam further provides explanation for why there is relatively little plot in his novel; he said there are aspects of novel writing he does not pay much attention to or give much time to, and when asked which aspects, he replied
Story. Creating a well-rounded character. Setting. Dialogue. Historical context. I try to pay attention to these things—I do try—but they’re always afterthoughts. […] I have this little voice in my head that says I need to try—but those elements of novel writing are not what I am interested in
The Paris Review
Not only is there little plot, there is zero dialogue in the novel. This too is explained by the author, discussing his own relationship with the Tamil language.
I had my entire education in English, but in the last six or seven years, I’ve been educating myself in Tamil, and I hope eventually to write in Tamil. I feel that it will take five or ten years before I will feel that I have enough mastery of the written part of that language to feel confident with what I do in it. But that’s something that’s important to me because I feel that English is a colonial language. It’s the language of aspiration in Sri Lanka. It’s the language that is a mark of making it. It’s something I hate—I hate the English-speaking communities of Sri Lanka, India, and South Asia. It’s important to me, eventually, to write in my mother tongue. […] Writing in Tamil, for a Tamil-speaking audience, feels like an important political position for me” (Guernica). Arudpragasam explains that almost all the relationships and dialogues in this novel are in Tamil, and therefore it would be an absurdity to put “English words into Tamil mouths” […] I don’t want to be engaging in ventriloquism.
The Paris Review
The author has a second reason for avoiding dialogue altogether in his novel: he tells an interviewer that in the past, he was “simply not being interested in what people say to each other”, but that he no longer thinks that, and now believes that there are “moments of conversation in which people reveal themselves, and they’re often moments that have a kind of confessional quality, in which a truth is spoken.” However, he also thinks this very rarely occurs, requiring as it does particular conditions, and so instead, he has left out dialogue since
So much of conversation is about eliding certain things, posturing in certain ways, concealing various things, manipulating another person a certain way, angling of certain kinds. And I don’t have the patience as a writer to look for the truth of a person in the silences or the gaps or the contradictions. That requires a lot of patience that, unfortunately, I don’t have.
The Paris Review
The absence of dialogue does not take anything away from the artistry of the novel. For most part, the writing is strong and compelling, even lyrical, and the elegant (even if lengthy) inclusion of various stories and legends from the Kalidasa, Sanskrit poets, and other classical sources, enrich the present-day storyline and give the novel a wonderfully South-Asian, Sri Lankan flavour. However, Arudpragasam himself attests:
If I was now interested in canonicity, it would have less to do with a South Asian canon than specifically a Tamil canon
The Paris Review
All the same, for all the remarkable achievement of the novel, there are small wrinkles which perhaps a strong editor could easily have ironed out, for example, the use of imagery which occasionally may need a little working on perhaps: Krishan, on an overnight train, is written of as drawing the curtains of his berth’s “womb-like space” (p149), but then immediately the passage discusses the scratched windowpane, the passing countryside and trees outside, the points of light at distance…either the womb metaphor was somewhat carelessly included, or else the author’s notion of a womb is very unusual indeed. In all probability, the intention was simply to indicate to readers it was a cosy, confined, darkened, secluded space that felt safe, but “womb-like” was perhaps not the best thought through description of a train berth.
However, this is only Arudpragasam’s 2nd novel, and 2nd novels are said to be the hardest to write. This is a sterling effort, confidently handled, deeply searching, characterised by a continuous exercise in introspection. Interestingly, it conveys an impression not just of the introspection typical of a self-searching, intelligent man who is trying to find (and take) his place in the world, but of quite a young man. Perhaps the element of youth is conveyed/implied by the sense of delighted wonder at his own originality and thoughts, the exploration of the self still feeling so novel and exciting. There is an unthinkingly youthful self-indulgence in the primacy given by the protagonist to the workings of his own mind. But the self-indulgence is saved from self-righteousness by the painful integrity of the protagonist, who does not spare himself, and indeed, it comes across that this novel is written by an author who attempts to tell the truth, as he sees it, with the same painful integrity of his protagonist. Doubtless Arudpragasam is fully aware his version of the truth will make uncomfortable reading for many Sri Lankans who may not have the same sympathies as the author. But this reader, at least, goes away convinced that Arudpragasam’s novels are written in good faith, with passion, with integrity.
Arudpragasam’s version of truth, however, may well change over the course of his life, and it will be a fascinating journey to follow this author on, as he continues his 3rd novel, which he says will be set in Toronto, Paris, and New York, even further removed from the violence in Sri Lanka.
None of us [and by us, the author refers to “many Tamils, especially young Tamils outside the war zone”] will ever be able to forget the war, it will shape and mark us for the rest of our lives.
The Paris Review
The author is aware obsession is not healthy, and has found it important to move away from the immediacy of the violence,
to move away from imagining it, from confronting this violence so directly. And this is what I try to do. I look forward to the day when I will be able to write about something else, but it wasn’t the case with my first novel, and it certainly wasn’t the case with this novel—even though I didn’t mean for A Passage North to be about the genocide. […] one thing I was very clear to do was to describe no violence in this book.
The Paris Review
In spite of this disclaimer however, there is violence described in this book, but it does attempt to focus more on the impact of the violence (not just physical, but mental and psychological) than on the brutalities.
And whatever his political take, this is an excellent writer, currently one of Sri Lanka’s best, even if yet again from its diaspora as so many of their literary lions (Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai) have been. A Passage North is a marvellous read, and deserving of all its accolades.
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