While signing for me his book Chats with the Dead, which as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize last week, Shehan Karunatilaka wrote: “Sorry but not much cricket in this one…”
This was an understatement. The Seven Moons is as far removed from Shehan’s first novel, Chinaman, as it can get. Except for one thing – the voice. It is the same voice which used cricket to tell us a larger story about Sri Lanka that is now telling us a ghost story/murder mystery to highlight the terrors and absurdities of the war-torn country of the 1980s. It is a voice that is at once knowing and naive, energetic and world-weary, achingly real and stunningly surrealistic.
Few writers sound like their books; Shehan does. He once told me in Bengaluru how he had got into money laundering – he accidentally threw into the washing machine his jeans which contained his passport and some money. When asked by a reporter how he celebrated the news of his getting longlisted for the Booker, he said, “With a packet of cashew nuts and a can of toddy.” On whether his kids were a distraction to his writing (he writes between 4 am and 7 am when everybody else is asleep), he said, fondly, “Every time they come through the door a paragraph is removed from your head”
In the build-up to the Booker, he wrote, “A population on the brink of poverty is welcoming the distraction of our Asia-conquering cricket and netball teams. Could it be that what this country really needs is a Booker prize?”
There is a staggering honesty in his interviews — this is a man comfortable in his skin, a writer who makes his angst work for him.
The energy and coruscating brilliance of The Seven Moons has as much to do with the theme of a dead man telling the tale as with the technique: it is written in the second person. The judges praised the “ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques”. Audacious hilarity would have fit too.
1989 was a desperate time in Sri Lanka. There was a civil war in the north, an insurrection in the south. Government death squads roamed about. The Indian army was there too, and no one was quite sure who the enemy was, who killed whom and how many died. It has taken an impossible ghost story to explore the possible.
The book’s epigraph is intriguing, and, in keeping with everything else, inevitable too. “There are only two gods worth worshipping,” it says. “Chance and electricity.”
Thus, even before you read the first line, there is promise of unexpected connections. Or the juxtaposition of incongruities.