ROMESH GUNESEKERA Suncatcher. Reviewed by Ann Skea
This new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Reef explores memories of a Sri Lankan childhood.
Kairo is looking back at his younger self: at a summer in his home in Colombo in 1964, when school was closed and he was aimlessly riding his bike around a church car park ‘midway as the crow flies between the mosque and the temple’. He remembers the casual meeting with Jay, who was taller, and a couple of years older than him, and how they were both still young enough enjoy the challenge of racing their bikes down a steep road. He sees ‘two boys on the brink of a bond which would alter the course of our lives’ and he tells their story as if it were just happening.
Young Kairo’s imaginative view of the world is fuelled by the comic books he reads. He sees rustlers and outlaws in the bushes of local gardens, and he and Jay play at cowboy shootouts. But, unlike Jay, he is still young enough to be disturbed and confused by his feelings when the local girl, Niromi, joins them and gets close to him. Naively, he puts these feelings down to fear that Jay will prefer her company to his own and he will lose his friend.
Jay, he discovers, lives in a large mansion called Casa Lihiniya, and belongs to what Kairo’s socialist-leaning, working-class father calls the ‘haute bourgeois’. Unlike Kairo’s parents, the adults in Jay’s family leave him to do whatever he likes. Mostly, he spends time collecting animals – exotic fish and birds – and looking after them, and Kairo learns much about these animals from Jay as he helps him to build a large aviary in the gardens of Lihiniya. He observes a great deal, too, in a casual way, about Jay’s world, which is so much more privileged than his own. A journey with Jay to an estate bungalow on a coconut plantation owned by Jay’s uncle seems to him:
… as fantastic as a trip to Mars or Moscow. It hardly took a blink now to relocate myself to a mythical ranch of rawhide and tumbleweed and turn geckos into iguanas.
And Jay’s uncle, being what Kairo’s father disparagingly calls ‘an absentee landlord’, employs a number of people on his estate:
To Jay the arrangement was perfectly natural. I could see how easily he could slip into his uncle’s place one day: inherit this estate and loom over the shorter lives of less favoured people. The word ‘plight’ that my father had used wriggled uneasily in my mouth.
Kairo sees, too, Jay’s casual discrimination against Gerry, the son of the Muslim superintendent employed on the estate, who accompanies them on their adventures there and joins in their games. He is disturbed by the way Jay treats Gerry and by the ease with which he dismisses their joint involvement in a nasty injury Gerry sustains.
Partly, Kairo’s new awareness is aroused by reading ‘the thinnest book he could find’ to pack for the journey: Problems of Life had ‘a blazing red title’, which he thought ‘promised answers he could test out in the field’, but it turned out to be a socialist tract about life in the Soviet Union.
Frequently, when he is with Jay at Lihiniya, Kairo observes the way Jay’s father abruptly dismisses Jay’s interests; and he half falls in love with Jay’s glamorous mother, Sonia, seeing, but not understanding, her empty, alcohol-fuelled lifestyle.
Kairo’s own mother works at the local radio station and is concerned enough about threatened school closures due to political unrest to hire a tutor, whose attempt to educate him Kairo cleverly undermines. His view of his own father is that he:
… lived in the hope that good things would happen naturally and was dumbfounded when they didn’t. Dialectic materialism, in his opinion, governed everything – even luck. A win at the bookies, he believed, was inevitable – much to my mother’s dismay.
But seeing the way the fights between Jay’s parents are serious and damaging, Kairo comes to appreciate that, although they are constantly ‘bickering’, his parents rub along together in spite of their differences, and that the bond between them is strong.
Romesh Gunesekera beautifully captures Kairo’s imaginative responses to life, his fascination with books of every kind, his adolescent confusions and insecurities, and his desire for Jay’s friendship. And although Kairo is still politically unaware, he sees and hears and reports things which suggest some of the underlying tensions which inevitably exist in a society where Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim people live together. There is humour, too, in some of the things Kairo reports. Listening to his father discussing the unsettled political situation with his friend, Shaku, he remembers Shaku sarcastically describing a politician’s plans to increase hospitality and tourism as ‘hotels and sin-bins’. Asked if he thinks anyone from other countries would bother to come, Shaku’s response is that:
From England, Holland, Portugal, all those old imperialist countries, they’ll come rushing – in their bathing costumes instead of their gunboats. This time we will be the ones to plunder them. Stolen enough, no? Now let them come and pay through the nose for sun-stroke and malaria.
This is a delightful book, beautifully written, and with the nostalgic feel of a remembered childhood spent in a city that was still largely undeveloped at a time when different ethnic groups lived together in a fragile harmony before political unrest resulted in the devastating Sri-Lankan civil war. But it is also the compelling story of two very different boys whose friendship comes to an abrupt end and leaves Kairo searching for ‘that lost time’. As his storytelling ends, it is the ‘bluish-green flicker of a firefly above the lantana bushes’ which offers the adult Kairo hope – ‘illuminating a path from one point of darkness to another beckoning’.
Romesh Gunesekera Suncatcher Bloomsbury 2020 PB 208pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.
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