Provocative, amusing, magic realism

In all fairness to the author, I should start this review with a weaselly disclaimer of sorts: that I do not think this review will do justice to the novel or author, because I don’t fully grasp the genre, nor the implications and ramifications of Karunatilaka’s writing. However, since I twice tried and failed to read his first novel, Chinaman, published exactly 10 years ago in 2012 and which won the Commonwealth prize, now that Seven Moons has been shortlisted for the 2022 Booker, I felt the onus was on me to attempt to engage with this latest, clearly a highly regarded novel by a Sri Lankan. It is also great to celebrate that 2 years consecutively now, there is a Sri Lankan novel in the Booker shortlist! 

The novel begins with a dead protagonist; page 1 of the novel tells us that while on the gravestone it would say “Malinda Albert Kabalana. 1955-1990”, on his business card, it would say “Maali Almeida. Photographer, Gambler. Slut.” Almeida is one of the privileged of Colombo, one of those who have attended a prestigious boys school and whose networks have placed him in upper-classed social circles, which he then disdains for their hypocrisy, even as he is enjoying the privileges and comforts,  a champagne socialist, as he is accused of being. He himself is of mixed descent, with a Sinhalese father and a Burgher-Tamil mother. He regards himself as an outsider-insider, views himself as someone who is of the set but different from that set, who dares to break their rules. He is estranged from his parents, lives with both his male lover and his best and/or girlfriend (they are cousins and their father/uncle is a prominent minister), but actually seems rather a loner. To add to the list on his business card, he is also an atheist, a rather promiscuous homosexual, and a risk taker who does not hesitate to go into conflict areas to take those photographs.  

The writing style of the book is very provocative, always veering sharply away from decorousness, throwing their hierarchical and unjust class system and unfair social structures in the teeth of respectable citizens. There are also a lot of lovely, amusing observations about Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans.

Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points.

p4

It also makes a clear point of refusing to show favouritism to any race:

Despite all speeches made to the contrary, the naked bodies of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Burghers, are indistinguishable. We all look the same when held to the flame.

p317

In fact, he goes further and even suggests identities are practically fluid, and that disguising oneself as being a Lankan of another race (such as Drivermalli successfully does), is not particularly problematic,

It is easy to Sinhalise a Tamil name, by amputating the consonant at the end.

p319

There is a lot of comic value in the writing, and it is definitely an intelligent book, original and witty, but magical realism has never quite managed to rock my boat, and all this floating around as a spirit in the afterlife, or rather in the In Between, before going to The Light, and sharing the space with other spirits, ghosts, demons, yakas, pretas and so on, riding on winds and whispering in ears, rather loses my interest. I would have preferred just reading an ordinary tale of human beings, I think, minus the supernatural. No doubt, in literary terms, the added realm of the fantastic enables another level of social commentary and imagination, but lacking the latter, sometimes magical realism comes across to me as lazy plot machinations and weak excuses for sudden and unreasoned scene changes. However, one gets the thrust of the story, that our dead protagonist is given 7 days to accomplish something important to him, and from the start of the novel, it is clarified that a moon is not a month, which is the conventional understanding of a moon’s orbit time around the earth:

Seven moons is seven nights. Seven sunsets. A week.

p5

The reasoning provided our protagonist by another undead is not quite convincing – that the moon is always up there even if we can’t see it – in which case the novel’s title might just as well be seven suns instead of seven moons, since the sun is always up there too. But this is the problem with magical realism for me, that even as the author points out its illogics, they need make no attempt even, to rationalise it or make it realistic, coherent, or credible. 

Perhaps the genre is why this novel’s plotline doesn’t quite hang together for me. At first the protagonist is set on the box of photographs under his bed being discovered by his best friend and taken to the correct people. Then when it is not, he is set on the negatives being developed and not falling into the wrong hands. Then the developed photos are hung in an exhibition, as he had asked of friends, when he was still alive. Then apparently the torturers capture Jaki, his best friend, and now he has a new mission, to save her, from his afterlife. It is all a little thin. The backdrop of Sri Lanka’s turmoil and conflict is very well depicted, in all its chaos, menace, ruthlessness, complicity. But the surreal elements detract from the plot and the context, rather than enriching it – but as a reader who does not generally get on with surrealism, this criticism is not worth much. Am ready to concede it stems from this reader’s own lack, rather than a flaw of the writing. 

For me, the value of this novel is how deftly it sets itself in the context of a very politicised, dangerous country, but with a distinctive Lankan texture and flavour:

In the Sri Lanka of the ‘80s, ‘disappeared’ was a passive verb, something the government or JVP anarchists or Tiger separatists or Indian Peace Keepers could do to you depending on which province you were in and who you looked like.

p24

The novel can be a little bewildering to a completely uninitiated reader because there are so many references to historical key events, and the involvement of so many parties all with their own agendas, all seemingly corrupt and double dealing and ruthless: the supposed NGOs who may be selling arms or who may be LTTE sympathisers, the police who are corrupt or under the control of some powerful figure, the casual hit men or men for hire who will kill and dispose of bodies summarily, the western agents who may be providing assignments for war photographers but may have other agendas, the politicians who wield considerable power and seem outside of the law; there seem to be so many political factions on top of the feared LTTE and anarchists. It portrays Sri Lanka of that time of conflict as a lawless place, where violence is the rule, and life is cheap.  

There are very few moments of nostalgia or sentiment in the novel, but there are flashes where there is an appreciation of the beauty of the country, while running down the sons and daughters of privilege:

The recently graduated International School kids would sit there chugging vodka and moaning about having to run their parents’ companies. The drama crowd would smoke dope and bitch about the drama club before hooking up with members of the drama crowd. The expat set would gaze out from the balcony at coconut trees silhouetted against ocean and wax poetic on the beauty of Lanka. 

It was true. When the wind blew through the balcony and the smoke and laughter filled the breeze, it was easy to forget that a horrible war was being fought a bus ride from here. Over here the stars and the lights of Colombo sang out in yellows and greens. The roads were quiet and the ocean purred. And Colombo wrapped itself in a safety blanket that we did not deserve.

P120

I am glad to have read this novel, I really am, despite my own personal reservations over its surrealist elements. And despite too its bulk of almost 400 pages, it reads fairly quickly and easily, testimony to the strength of its storytelling. The Sri Lankan elements, flavours, scenes, references, are delightful, distinctive, charming, frequently cheeky and amusing, and even endearing. The writer can get a tad carried away sometimes, for example, writing of a room which “smells of sweat and tears” (p314) – do tears really smell? But these little overdone flourishes aside, the extravagance and baroqueness of the writing is actually in the best of postcolonial traditions, Rushdiesque, the bombast and deliberate refusal to pull punches performed with tremendous self-awareness and confident artistry. Perhaps it is time for me to try Chinaman once again – because even if I cannot deny there was a slight struggle to get through Seven Moons, Karunatilaka’s is one of the brightest and best voices on the Sri Lankan writing in English scene, one of its sharpest socio-political commentators, and among the most accomplished of English-writing authors from this island; it is only to be hoped his work inspires and sets the standards for much more of this calibre.