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Liar’s Cricket

Book facts: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka. Reviewed
by Richard Simon

Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel Chinaman subsists – make that thrives – upon the wreckage produced by the collision of truth and fiction. It features among its characters a famous English cricketer-turned-commentator named Tony Botham and a Sri Lankan sports minister called Tyronne Cooray who had a stadium in Moratuwa named after him. It takes implausible liberties with the geography of De Saram Road, Mount Lavinia. Its overloaded, rattling pantechnicon of a plot advances unsteadily, forever teetering between seizure and disintegration, on stepping-stones of far-fetched contrivance. It is not perfect by any means, but it is by far the best novel ever written by a Sri Lankan who actually resides in his home country instead of merely visiting to attend literary festivals.

Its plot concerns the efforts of one W.G. Karunasena, an alcoholic ex-sports journalist, to research and write the biography of Pradeep Mathew, a Tamil spin-bowling genius who played for Sri Lanka in numerous test and one-day international matches as well as for Thurstan College, Royal College and Bloomfield C.C. Mathew, we are told, delivered spectacular performances in obscure games and more than once saved the day for his team and his country, but since the Nineties he has been somehow forgotten, lost to history. Even the few people who still remember him – old coaches, former teammates who never made the record-books, family members and an ex-girlfriend – don’t want to talk.

But W.G. is a fine old newshound despite his dependence on the bottle. Helped by his old friend Ari Byrd, he slowly teases out and weaves together the threads of Mathew’s story. It turns out that Mathew – arrogant, prickly, too honest for his own good – is the victim of an effective, secret purge. His name and achievements have been quietly but thoroughly expunged from the score-books and public records, and people of importance or authority who once knew him simply pretend he never existed. As for the man himself, he seems to have disappeared.

Foreign readers may find this aspect of the story hard to swallow, but Sri Lankans who understand the power of conspiratorial denial in our history and culture will find the suspension of disbelief easy. Many notable Ceylonese have been erased from the records and deliberately forgotten because they pointed out uncomfortable truths, or went again prevailing opinions, or were simply members of the wrong race or religion. The iconic elements of contemporary Sri Lankan culture – the lying politician’s pristine raiment, the worldly bhikkhu with his business interests and political connections, the bland white van of the abductor – are all symbols of denial: denial of truth, denial of reality. W.G. Karunasena himself is an avowed practitioner of the art, not least when he tries, as Sinhalese often do, to lay the blame for Lanka’s ethnic and social divisions at the feet of the Europeans who ruled us for so long. No-one really believes this, of course – even the spit-flying ‘nationalist’ fanatic knows in his heart that it is a lie – but I suppose it helps us live with ourselves.

Behind the wall of denial that conceals Pradeep Mathew, Karunasena finds many unsavoury things: racism in sport, feuds over women, honey-traps, ball-tampering, theft and counter-theft, evidence of match-fixing at international level, collusion between the government and the LTTE. W.G. is warned off and threatened by mysterious callers. He is taken for more than one white-van ride. It is all very Sri Lankan, masterfully imagined and convincingly presented.

At times it is hard to remember that Chinaman is a work of fiction. Indeed, the postmodernist acrobatics that decorate the last hundred pages or so may persuade a few gullible readers otherwise. But writers know that fiction is rarely all made up; the clay they work with is real enough, the stuff of their own lives and other people’s, though normally so altered in the moulding and firing that the finished artefact bears very little resemblance to the people or events that inspired it. Karunatilaka expertly negotiates the tightrope between truth and fiction, telling a story that takes place in the real world and features real characters and events together with the fictitious ones. Nevertheless – and to repeat myself – Chinaman is fiction and no-one, as Hemingway once wrote, should be so egotistical as to see himself or herself in any of its characters. It is important to note this, because an author of fiction in a savage country is exposed to many dangers his colleagues in the civilized world need not fear.

One particular aspect of the novel seems to me to correspond faithfully to real life. It is a metaphorical correspondence, not a literal one, and subtle withal; perhaps only someone who has personally experienced the qualms, second thoughts, boggings-down, crises of confidence and feelings of helplessness that plague a writer who genuinely labours to turn an inchoate mass of half-expressed ideas and half-completed phrases into a work of art will be able to spot it. Indeed, the correspondence of which I speak can only properly be guessed at; but I think I have enough experience to assert that it is real. It is this: W.G. Karunasena’s struggles with the bottle precisely mirror Shehan Karunatilaka’s struggles to write his novel.

Part One of Chinaman ends when a television documentary W.G. has written about Mathew is telecast. At this point the real story is only just beginning, and its author, having surmounted the foothills whose conquest has monopolized his energy and attention up to that point, looks up and comprehends fully, probably for the first time, the Himalayan task awaiting him. At this juncture, as if in sympathy with his creator, W.G. has his first serious medical crisis.

Afterwards, the arc of his affair with the bottle – his renunciations, backslidings, bouts of illness and catalogues of ever-more-terrifying symptoms – appear side by side with other signs that indicate, to the experienced eye, that Karunatilaka is feeling the weight of his material, that the process of drafting and re-drafting is beginning to confuse and daunt him. Somewhere just past the two-thirds mark, which is the point at which any novel and its author enter the doldrums of creativity, W.G. suffers his worst alcoholic reverse so far. And when Karunatilaka hits the wall, 150 pages or thereabouts from the end, Karunasena ends up in hospital.

Fortunately, both author and book recover. The final portion of Chinaman contains a number of surprises of a technical kind whose true origin may well lie in the shifts to which the author was driven in order to bring about any kind of ending to the book at all. This is not to denigrate his achievement, for to turn an innings around with only one wicket in hand, in failing light, is (as any cricket fan will tell you) a task for heroes.

Until Chinaman, I had yet to read a Sri Lankan English novel that stayed good, or even palatable, to the last drop. Some had arguable literary merits – a charming sense of time or place, real action and suspense, the odd felicitous turn of phrase or telling auctorial insight – but none of them were worth a damn as a story, one that kept you interested, that had a plot which stayed the course and characters anyone but the author could possibly care about. Not one of them, frankly, ever had a proper ending. Chinaman has that, and pretty much everything else it takes, too. The first genuine contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel has entered the lists.

And Sri Lankan it is with a vengeance. Its blend of fact and fiction closely resembles the made-up ‘history’ Sri Lankan children are taught in school. Its subject, cricket, is, of course, our national obsession, but in the background, Karunatilaka also touches, without ever making it look like a stretch, upon all the crucial Sri Lankan realities: racism, all-pervasive yet blandly denied; class snobbery; endemic corruption, moral failure and cultural decline; suicide-bombings, alcoholism, paedophile sex tourism; the shadow of the colonial past and the failures of the first post-Independence generation. It’s a depressing list, but in spite of it, as we all know, Sri Lanka is a far from depressing country.

And Shehan Karunatilaka’s book isn’t depressing at all. It’s a festival, a carnival, a giddy riot on Galle Face Green after Sri Lanka wins the World Cup. Even its faults – fragmentary construction, occasional grammatical and stylistic infelicities, sloppy editing that has allowed a few fragments from earlier drafts to infiltrate the final text – are thoroughly Sri Lankan.

On p.163 of the book, W.G. Karunasena reminisces about how he felt ‘watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else.’ I don’t give an all-girl softball team captain’s toss for cricket, but I know a bit about writing. Shehan Karunatilaka and Chinaman have made me feel exactly the same.

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