Sage of three friends amidst a 26-year conflict
A novel that spans almost the entire Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sunset of Illusions is told mainly through the perspectives of three people who mature from youths precariously poised on the paradise island’s shifting fortunes: Jeevan, a Tamil, Chrishan, a Sinhalese, and Sandy, a Burgher.
The novel’s insights into the 26-year war are fascinating and epic in their proportions shifting from Wellawatte to London with its embittered Tamil émigrés, the killing fields of Kilinochchi with pockmarked, empty houses, desolate scrub jungle and calloused rebel youths, and nostalgic sunsets at the Galle Face Hotel to greener pastures Down Under…
The perspective deftly shifts- from the Colombo Sinhalese to the afflicted Northern Tamils, the white NGO mediators in their ‘cool casual shirts and chino pants’ but also true ministering angels, the Muslims, the Burghers, the posh second generation British Tamilian youths…
The author, C. M. Fernando, whose debut work of fiction this is, is a senior business and financial professional and chartered accountant, who serves as director on the boards of several organisations.
The author, shows that truth has ‘many sides’ and can never be absolute – how reality changes according to experience – or as Sandy who quotes her social science lessons from Peradeniya says to the boys, “Relativism… and conflict of realities”. The confrontation of competing historical narratives is woven like a filigree pattern across the story.
But at the crux, like the surprise in the Faberge egg, is a tale of love and friendship between the three main characters who go through so much. The poignancy of it is powerful as happens with a novel that is part bildungsroman and sweeps through first teenage crushes, marriage, bereavement and reunion.
Jeevan’s story particularly is moving; a vulnerable youth who, though sensible and kind-hearted, is drawn marginally like a moth to fire to LTTE activity due to injustices he encounters – and, as the blurb of the novel says, reflects the ‘human faces caught in the political struggle’.
The author though Sinhalese is very empathetic and open to the Tamil side of it though he does expose terrorism at its worst. Fernando sympathetically portrays those LTTE militants like Vasanthan who were clearly likeable youths and were victims.
The novel’s portrayal of the last leg of the war is momentous, dramatic and keeps the reader waiting with bated breath as Jeevan is among the refugees fleeing from Mullivaikkal.
That love, friendship and humanity can triumph at the end whatever the odds, is the heartrending message the climax conveys. In that way Sunset of Illusions is a reminder, despite its title, that this world can after all be a redeeming, positive, happy entity despite ‘the darkest clouds’.
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