Chinaman: A Review

P.R. Wijemanne

When Shehan Karunatilaka won the Gratiaen Prize with Chinaman in 2008 some announced that the Great Sri Lankan Novel had finally arrived, and almost all those who had read it in manuscript form at that time concurred. The newspapers that weekend were deluged with unconditional praise despite the novel not even being published till 2011, three years later. While ‘Chinaman’ tries hard to please expectations super-inflated by Big Publishing advertising and meek Sunday-newspaper criticism, reading it is an entertaining opportunity of examining what the “Great Sri Lankan Novel” is all about.

Subtitled ‘The legend of Pradeep Mathew’, Chinaman is the story about W.G. Karunasena, incorrigible drunk and retired sports journalist, who after being condemned to death by a decaying liver decides to write a book tracing the forgotten career of Cricketer Pradeep Mathew, who, W.G. is convinced, possesses that rare absolver of sins, Genius. Very like Charles Strickland in Somerset Maugham’s Moon and Sixpence, Mathew remains a phantom for most part of Chinaman, pursued, but not found, by W.G. Karunasena and his ‘side-kick’ Ariyaratne Byrd through a long exhaustive course of unreliable informants, disappointments and eroding health. Mathew’s talent which he squanders with his arrogance and ill-temper and his chase after a girl’s love which he shall never lastingly attain resonates with W.G.’s own life. W.G. neglects to cherish his dedicated wife, fails his son and, cornered into being an abased, bellicose failure, continues to follow the shadow of Mathew. W.G. hopes that his masterpiece written on the life of Mathew shall redeem his ignominious life beyond the grave and somehow give the kisses he withheld from his wife, the friendship he denied his son and the greatness Mathew was robbed of. So convinced, we watch the old man picturesquely destroy himself, and himself attain obscurity.

However, the title of the book and W.G.’s mission are intentionally misleading. The real focus of the novel is not Mathew, or even Cricket, though both these are instrumental and without them Karunatilaka, the author, cannot say what he is trying to. Parallel to the spiritual slump of W.G.’s old-age and the genius of Mathew that the jealous misunderstanding world had contrived to obscure, Chinaman also tells, or at any rate tries to tell, the story of Sri Lanka: from isso vadey-the prawn wafer, to Cricket-mania to the L.T.T.E, an entire Sri Lanka is covered. This is where “The Great Sri Lankan Novel” ceases to be a mere marketing tool of Publishing Houses or a nonsense phrase used by coffee-sipping expatriates at Barefoot to show they know and care about literature and Sri Lanka. Before evaluating the artistic success of the novel it is more interesting to analyse this phenomenon.

In Chinaman there are dialogues that capture the careless, elliptical, grammar-defying, inverted, funny, aberrant form of English* spoken commonly by the English speaking classes. There are the subtle but incremental and foreboding changes as the political atmosphere surrounding W.G. and his Mathew chase darkens with regime changes and Colombo streets choke with Army checkpoints, taxes increase to buttress defense funds, paranoia grows among intellectuals, incredible conspiracy theories breed among the uneducated, there are more bomb scares, more bomb explosions etc. There is even the quintessentially Sri Lankan tardiness (meetings start at 0.15 SLT, or Sri Lankan Time, “that is fifteen minutes after the scheduled start”) and procrastination (while the Spanish postpone with mañana, Sri Lankans give an ironically non-committal definitely). There are local place-names, the betel stained teeth, the almost hourly tea-drinking, the choice range of cheap Arrack brands of desperate journalists. There also are the Sinhalese-Tamil slang staples that are unavoidable in colloquial speech like maara, hena, ammataudu appearing intermittently in dialogue. This gives an idea of the lengths that Karunatilaka has gone to deliver the very texture of Sri Lankan life through the book. Of course this is nothing new for a novel. James Joyce did this to Dublin, as D.H. Lawrence did to Nottingham, Thomas Hardy to Dorset etc. Every writer has to localise one’s story, place one’s characters and plot in a complete and plausible universe: it is elementary craft in novel-writing. But what is so basic to the above mentioned writers can be a conundrum to English writers whose native-tongue is not English and whose culture, history and system of values is unintelligible to those outside the boundaries of their countries. How can a Sri Lankan writer in English communicate the idiosyncrasies of our people to the empathy of foreigners who have not met them, shared their past or their aspirations? How to imprint in the imagination of an alien mind the blotched asphalt roads, languorous heat, austere cooking and the shabby limp physical-postures of people which are the formulae for Politics and Religion in Sri Lanka? The English novelist in Sri Lanka is poised as Helen Keller trying to tutor the blind deaf-mute.

What is beautiful about the Sri Lanka portrayed in Chinaman is that it is not the hopeless sinful nation of the religion-mongers, the oppressive genocidal tyranny of Norway foreign-policy-agents, nor is it the waterfall paradise of Ministry of Tourism advertisements. True, Karunatilaka writes about the corrupt bureaucracy, alleged political assassinations, culling of press-freedom, fermenting racial prejudice and, unavoidably, the war, too (the midget’s spools and the activities of I.E. Kugarajah reveal a backdrop of political-chess-playing). But in writing so Karunatilaka’s attitude is more a jarred sense of humanity, which, despite being irresponsible, is more palatable than the condescending tourist type pitying the warring barbarians or the Opposition partisan view lamenting the slip of power from English speaking ‘gentlemen’ of Catholic descent or the view of the simple, shameless government sycophants. Karunatilaka’s Sri Lanka is the nostalgic nineties era of power-cuts, innocuous pop songs, and the ’96 Cricket World Cup euphoria. It is a Sri Lanka before satellite TV, 20-20 Cricket, the “corporate lifestyle”, superficial techno-music glorifying atavism or facebook. So even while Karunatilaka is writing about Sri Lankan unpunctuality, irresponsibility and profligacy and drunkenness, he does this with affection. Quite the way the sunset in Galle Face charmingly tints the spittle stains on the road, unhygienic food and the garbage nestling among the sea waves, Karunatilaka’s prose beautifies and affirms the harmless and amusing quirks of the locals. For a change it is not the Sri Lanka of the propagandists, but that of an artist. It is perhaps this joy of rediscovering one’s country that momentarily gives meaning to “The Great Sri Lankan Novel”. Discounting Great, Chinaman is still a highly entertaining Sri Lankan Novel.

Having said this, the book is still a thoroughly ambivalent read. In articulating the Sri Lankanness, Karunatilaka has crowded Chinaman with anecdotes, political criticism and speculation of the most hackneyed kind. There are large areas of the book that amount to little more than prettily worded journalism. Some of the colloquial jargon and anecdotes included in the dialogue would probably be beyond the comprehension of foreign readers, which is a serious concern if Karunatilaka intends to write truly universal, immortal literature. For an example, it is very unlikely that a non-local would be able to fully understand the significance of Mathew, a Thurstanite causing the first Royal win over St. Thomas in 1983 and the analogy between the other coinciding events of that year, which includes an L.T.T.E attack on the Navy. It is also a little annoying that whenever we are accorded a glimpse to Mathew’s life in between W.G.’s drinking bouts, Mathew is always struggling to surface a constant layer of unappreciative mediocrity, incompetence and envy. Time to time W.G. over-aggrandizes Mathew’s greatness. This actually results in inconsistencies in Mathew’s projected character. For an example Mathew is once eulogized as the irreverent pioneer of sledging (verbally abusing opposition team players in a Cricket match) always writhing uncomfortably under the stiflingly decent coach and at another time portrayed as the one player who remained the loyal supporter of the coach and refused to cheat a match while everyone else in the team did. At some point Mathew appears like a Hindu God, with multiple arms, faces and personalities: he is the rebellious maverick and the wise gentleman at the same time, he is the shy outcast of the team and its most aggressive ingrate simultaneously etc. It is not that Mathew cannot be a complex character capable of apparent contradictions, but Karunatilaka sometimes writes an ode too many about Mathew’s genius. The novel is also a Cricket novel, meaning that there are long lists of Cricket statistics, anecdotes and the like, sometimes even quite irrelevant to the story. I wonder whether a person without a genuine passion for “the sweet sound of willow meeting leather” will fully appreciate the book, despite these Cricketing parts being decorated with sensational debaucheries and Fitzgeraldian parties. There are parts of the book where Cricket is more than an artistic device or a vehicle for the story but a fully fledged passion by itself. As a Sri Lankan whose childhood was spent in the dear ‘nineties, I cannot complain. But If I was given a book about Baseball, a sport against which I have an unshakeable prejudice, and told that it was the “Great American Novel”, I imagine someone would still have to hold a gun to my head for me to read it. However, one has to understand the ridiculous degree of relevance cricket has in Life in Sri Lanka. Therefore, Karunatilaka couldn’t have chosen a better subject than cricket to write the “Great Sri Lankan Novel”, if he was aware that he was doing such a thing, that is.

Also, Karunatilaka resorts to a cheap kind of gimmick at the end of the story by making W.G.’s masterpiece to be completed by someone writing under the pseudonym which is also the real author’s real name and creating a looping effect to the book. It is the kind of the ingenuity that tried to improve Cricket by introducing the shimmying cheer-leaders. The book which till then was a good thing of its own kind was suddenly thrown into the very crowded room of tricksters.

Whatever said of the novel, nothing can detract from the prose of the book. It is unquestionably one of the best prose pieces to be written by an English writer in Sri Lanka. There is a tightness that comes to it by an evident process of revision and elimination. The writing is also quite humourous; the smile that spreads with the first page stays till the end. The writer also has to be congratulated for his remarkable patience, for Chinaman is the conversion of a life-time of observing Sri Lankans into literature; so much so, one has the morbid feeling that Karunatilaka has purged his innards trying to pull his “Sri Lanka” out onto typeset. He had waited till he had a story worth selling to write all of it. Chinaman is also the work of a writer fearless of the law of libel, or ignorant of it. Anyway, it is a work with the least amount of self-censoring and inhibitions to be published by a Sri Lankan. Karunatilaka has written sincerely about the war, the normal-family life and Cricket, the old-school-tie and the positive patriotism no Sri Lankan can really filter from their blood, topics that most writers circumnavigate because they are unsure of what to say and fear not appearing original.

* I am aware that this series of adjectives is replaceable by what people call Sri Lankan English. I am also aware that there is a lobby arguing for its legitimization as a distinct language. But I refuse to categorize it as such because there isn’t a singular identifiable code unanimously adhered to by Sri Lankans who speak English. Different people at different stations of life of different classes of society speak different kinds. For an example the crude parlance of Jabir the trishaw driver in Chinaman would be an unrecognizably different species compared to the dulcet lilts of a convent-educated gossiping housewife. However the case stands, if people speak in a certain way then the novelist has to record it.