Things Fall Apart

I read about Sun-Catcher by Romesh Gunesekara in one of Kinokuniya's newsletters and suddenly, I felt the need to read a post-colonial text. Blame it on the post colonial unit I took with Susan in ECU. Anyway, I ordered the book along with another also advertised on the newsletter (good newsletter, resulted in the sale of two books by be alone, wonder how it fared with other people). Naturally, now Kino has banned me because of my old version of Chrome (seriously, this MacBook won't update the Chrome - so what to do? I'll buy from Book Depository from now on), there won't be anymore clickthroughs, the more's the pity.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

Get it together, Jennifer, stick to the point!

Yeah, like that's going to happen...ever!

The book is set in the 60s, after Ceylon achieved independence. Everyone is pulling in their own direction, trying to set this new though ancient (think Serendip, where Serendipity comes from and the Mahabrata and where Siddharta is actually from) land.

But that simply forms the background noise...talk about land reform, chicken farms, real Marxist as opposed to fake Marxist principles, landowners, drinks at the club, betting forms, shifting from English to the mother tongue, Sinhala, secondhand bookshops...

All of this is there, but it is irrelevant or hardly. It's a tale of two boys. And ever since I watched The Untamed and read its founding text The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, I tend to be suspicious of hero worship between boys...and think there is some other element involved.

Anyway, there's Kairo, the younger, more impressionable one. The everyboy. The only child of parents who fight because their marriage was a mistake but stay together. He lives in a world on the brink of change which is precarious but comfortable because it's all he knows. Even if things are changing all around him, even if school is out because of strikes or riots, it just means a holiday. Nothing for him to worry about, really.

But Jay. Jay is not everyboy. He's rich. He lives in a villa. He has a beautiful mother who strums lazily on her harp while she sips her wine, the stuff of dreams. She calls Kairo "darling". He's half in love with her. He has a father he doesn't care for, thinking him an idiot. But that's OK. There is a strong male figure in his life, his Uncle Elvin who has a fleet of cool expensive cars and is just the right kind of urbane. The man women will love and not hold on to. But perhaps, there is something between him and Jay's beautiful mother, Sonya.

Perhaps.

It's never explained.

Jay is an ace biker and he can drive cars. He traps birds, catches fish, builds aviaries and aquariums. And he adopts Kairo in a carpark and they go for milkshakes. But Kairo who thinks they have something special realises he is only one of many in Jay's life. And like any new lover (?) that is unacceptable. He wants to be Jay's all-in-all.

And he can't.

There is an interlude where Kairo is invited to Uncle Elvin's coconut estate and he is horrified by the casual cruelty of Jay who shoots the son of the caretaker with his bow and arrow and injures him. And shrugs it off although the two were friends.. Kairo worries about the boy. But Jay and Elvin treat the whole thing as simply a bother.

At this point I paused.

Did I know anyone like that? Someone who could casually cut you and laugh while you're bleeding?

And blame you for it?

Yes, I did.

So enough. To continue...while the narrative of the two boys, then three boys, then two boys and a girl (yes, Jay has a girlfriend, Niromi and at first Kairo is jealous of her, then off Jay for having her), but all the while, things are falling apart in the country, in Jay's super privileged life.

There is a lot of foreshadowing in this novel of the tragedy that unfolds. But caught up in what is happening in front of you, you will probably ignore all the warning signs. And then you go back and re-read it and say, oh I see, it was there all along. Written between the words.

And then a thread is pulled from the sweater and it starts to unravel...slowly at first and the more urgently, and finally, you're left with coloured wool that was once a sweater. Fragments of what was once a pretty decent, even privileged life.

All the grown-ups in Jay's life abandons him one by one, for all their various grown up reasons and because, really, when you speak in a casual tone, inflecting your voice with just enough expression to show that you really, really don't care, that you're too cool, too sophisticated, too urbane...you inflict cruelty so effortlessly, in such a polished manner.

Nobody takes responsibility because nobody has to.

And the denouement, when it happens, is expected but entirely unexpected at the same time. It feels like a punch in the gut.

And you can't help it, you gasp for breath.

And you weep, just a little, for all that was lost.

In Lost Connections by Johann Hari, he talks about time stopping after a certain incident, and people wandering lost and homeless and hopeless, without a future. It is as if they were wiped out and their ghosts are simply haunting the land.

That is how it felt.

And at the end, you realise that all those asides were not simply so much chatter that you had to get through before getting back to the real story. They were building an edifice.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

When has the centre ever held, anyway?