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Enchantment entangled in reality
'The Hamilton Case': A Killing in Ceylon. By Michelle de Kretser.
Reviewed by William Boyd
At the end of Michelle de Kretser's multilayered and beguiling novel, one of its characters makes a typically gnomic statement: ''History, like any other verdict, is not a matter of fact but a point of view.''

''Point of view'' is the key phrase here, since it applies just as much to a work of fiction as it does to history. If you think of a novel as a complicated machine, then one of the best ways to understand how it functions - to determine what makes its component parts cohere and smoothly whir along- is to ask yourself a simple question: ''Who is telling us this story?'' The answer, nine times out of ten, provides an entry to the novel's inner workings.

In the instance of ''The Hamilton Case,'' this proposition is particularly germane because the novel's point of view shifts dramatically throughout. It starts off in orthodox first-person style with Sam Obeysekere, an elderly Sinhalese lawyer, relating his life story in a series of short chapters. Born in Ceylon in 1902 into the privileged bourgeois elite, Sam moves through private school in Colombo and on to Oxford, and then is called to the London bar.

After he returns to Ceylon, his practice thrives, but tensions are brewing in his family: his widowed mother, Maud, is selfish and demanding; his beloved, tormented sister, Claudia, is unhappily married to an egotistical, ambitious politician. Sam's own career path is thwarted by the covert racism of the British.

Set against a vivid and colourful background, Sam's rambling narrative is couched in a verbose and pompous style – somewhat testing the reader's patience, it has to be said. Here, for example, he speaks of his childhood with his wilfully generous father, a man whose ''iconic largesse'' eventually sends the family to the brink of bankruptcy: ''Like all admirable qualities, this liberality was hard on those in its vicinity. I learned to keep prized possessions hidden away after Pater spotted my beloved lead soldiers on the veranda, scooped up the Duke of Wellington and pressed him into the grubby hands of our cook-woman's grandson. I flew at the brat and kicked his ringwormed shins, for which I earned myself a thrashing.''

And so it goes, entertainingly enough, though you wonder where all this mannerism might be leading. Then, on a trip upcountry, Sam meets a fellow lawyer and former school friend, John Shivanathan, who invites him to dinner, along with the local superintendent of police, Conrad Nagel. Over brandy and coffee, Sam learns that Nagel is in charge of a complicated murder investigation - the killing of a white planter named Hamilton.

Here Sam's narrative abruptly ends and an ''author's note'' informs us that what we have just been reading were papers found after Sam Obeysekere's death. (Who is this ''author''? Michelle de Kretser?) Now the narrative point of view changes as we discover the details of the Hamilton case. Sam's voice – so idiosyncratic, so subjective – is replaced by something objective and apparently disinterested as ''I'' gives way to ''he.''

In this new voice, Part 2 of the novel explores the facts of the Hamilton murder and its aftermath. It turns out that Sam's analysis of the crime had been crucial: he spotted clues that pointed the finger of blame not at the coolies who were initially charged (and who allegedly murdered Hamilton for the money he was carrying) but at another white man, Gordon Taylor, a close friend of Hamilton, who had killed him in revenge, so the argument went, or in a jealous rage because he believed that Hamilton had sexually molested his young wife.

Taylor is put on trial and, although vehemently protesting his innocence, found guilty, whereupon he hangs himself. Sam, the Sinhalese who put this white man in the dock, is passed over for promotion as magistrate.

Part 3 takes up the story of Sam's life again, and again the narrative point of view changes. Here it becomes omniscient: the novelist can enter the heads of any of her characters and tell us what they are thinking. What emerges from this shift is a family chronicle, a cursed and melancholy history. We follow Sam's adult life, noting his loveless marriage to an heiress named Leela and the many failed pregnancies that precede the birth of their only child, a son called Harry. We learn too about Sam's mother's fate, about her increasing eccentricities and dementia. Through his sister's story, and through stories that stretch back to Sam's childhood, death begins to haunt the narrative.

World War II comes and goes, and so does India's partition and independence, yet the members of the Obeysekere family seem compelled to live out their existence more and more under the malign influence of the past. Family ghosts, whether real or imagined, appear on the fringes of their daily lives. Maud keeps hearing a child crying in the next room; Sam's own feelings of guilt begin to dog his existence.

A fourth and final shift goes some way toward clarifying the gathering mysteries. In the last few pages, we revert back to the first-person singular, but this time the voice belongs to John Shivanathan, the lawyer whose chance meeting with Sam led to his participation in the murder case. After Sam's death, Shivanathan writes to Harry Obeysekere, who has long been estranged from his father, explaining the truth of the Hamilton investigation. (In the interim, Shivanathan has written a collection of stories, and one of them, ''Death of a Planter,'' clearly revisits both the crime and the trial.) Shivanathan also reveals the shocking nature of Sam's infant brother's death, back in their distant childhood.

Yet even in this concluding passage, an air of ambiguity and uncertainty lingers. In his letter, Shivanathan's protestations of truth-telling are countered by any number of aphorisms about the impossibility of arriving at an authoritative version of events. ''We believe,'' he argues, ''the explanation we hear last. It's one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, an end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storyteller's ruse.

The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn't you say? Time never simplifies -- it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken.''

This is, in effect, the message of ''The Hamilton Case.'' Just as Shivanathan claims to elucidate the turbulent mysteries that have brewed in the novel, so he undermines them. Of all the literary genres that most conform to this craving for ''finality,'' the detective novel is the most obvious. Drawing on Agatha Christie and Somerset Maugham, de Kretser both constructs and then demolishes the implicit thesis that there is always one explanation, that every effect has an evident cause, that efficient deduction will arrive at the truth.

The rackety lives of Sam Obeysekere and his family eloquently illustrate the fundamental messiness and illogic of the human condition. ''Sometimes,'' Shivanathan confesses, ''the endless shifting of figure and ground drives me to despair. I long, like you, for the consolation of certainty. But murder, like all art, generates interpretation and resists explanation.'' ''Like all art.'' This novel -- which also beautifully renders the sensuality of Ceylon -- is a very artful and evocative plea for interpretation over explanation, for complication over simplification. As human beings, we hunger for something to be closed rather than left eternally open.

Hence the appeal of the sort of formulaic fiction in which a Hercule Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes gives us the satisfaction of believing that the ''truth'' is palpable and cathartic. But artists -- novelists -- know life isn't like that: the more serious you are, the more you must resist the impulse to provide narrative consolation.

Michelle de Kretser (who was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14) has taken this theme and, through a rich family history replete with joys and tragedies, adroitly demonstrated just what a baffling, intractable, multifaceted thing one person's life can be. Toward the novel's end, Shivanathan confesses to sharing Sam Obeysekere's fondness for detective fiction, a predilection that may have led them to misread the motives for Hamilton's murder. ''I had fallen,'' he explains, ''for an old enchantment. I had mistaken the world for a book.''

''The Hamilton Case'' does enchant, certainly, but -- more important - the book admirably and resolutely sees the world as it really is.
- The New York Times

Why not into Sinhala?
Chandri Peris speaks to Romesh Gunesekera in London
Most of us would have heard of Romesh Gunesekera because of his book 'Reef' which was nominated for a Booker prize in 1994. 'Reef' proved to be a landmark within the literary circles of the western world bringing the work of yet another Asian writer to the limelight.

Gunesekera followed up this initial success with 'The Sandglass' and 'Heaven's Edge' to add to an earlier collection of short stories under the title 'Monkfish Moon' and is now recognized as a prolific Asian writer working in the English medium.

As is traditional within the fraternity of writers, Romesh Gunesekera does not give even an inclination of what his next project may be . He is, however, less shy about disclosing details of his professional life. At present he is "a writer in residence" at Goldsmiths College, London where he is required to mentor students who aspire to be creative within the field of literature.

When I met Romesh Gunesekera, I wanted to find out certain details about his writing and its relationship to his native roots, because the books he has published thus far have been set in Sri Lanka or have a background that happen to be very reminiscent of its landscape and people. To him, however, it remains the decision of the reader as to where they locate the stories he has written. Asked about the possibilities of translating some of his work, he responded by giving me a totally new insight to the issues between East and West, and of the barriers that have to be faced by anyone writing in a language that is other than his native one. As I gather, the problems lie within our country and its people. First, there seem to be several Sinhalese writers who would rather publish their own work rather than depend on translating someone else's, and this is understandable.

Then there was the rise in Sinhalese nationalism, which was first apparent during the 1950s when the Sinhalese pamaney (Sinhalese only) ideology was being enforced promoting the alienation of anything considered foreign, including the use of other languages.

This example is now being reiterated by the rise of the Sihala Urumaya, who envisage a future in which our country recreates the glories of our so-called pre-colonial past, thus re-enforcing an ideology that stresses a distancing from other cultures, religions and languages that have influenced our land. This in turn results in rousing up negative responses to art, culture, and literature even in cases where it is being expressed in its richest and most cultivated form by one of our own people. It seems curious to me that Romesh Gunesekera's books have been translated into several other languages and not to Sinhala. There are also many other countries that extend invitations to him so that he sets an example for the younger generation of would-be writers but there has been very little encouragement from any of our institutions to do the same for our aspiring young writers.

There have been a few invitations from the British Council in Colombo, who obviously recognise him for his creativity in the same manner as the literary critics in the western world do. It remains to be seen if any of our universities will extend an invitation of this sort so that he may mentor the future literati of Sri Lanka and support the possibility of some of his work being accessed by the Sinhala-speaking public by encouraging a process of translation.

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