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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser
How can one resist a book that includes, right in the first paragraph, a passage like: "[Governor Sir Alban Marriott] has been in thrall to my mother ever since she sent him skin of a leopard she had shot, along with a note. I shall call on you between five and six. The skin is for the small blue reception room, which is ideally suited to fornication and whatnot"?
THE HAMILTON CASE takes place largely in 1930s Ceylon: there is something about Sri Lanka that will always remain Ceylon. And anyone who ever visited that "small island riding an ocean" (as one character calls it) will immediately recognize it in THE HAMILTON CASE.
Stanley Obeysekere (called Sam; his mother felt that "Stanley was only fit for a peon") is a product of Empire who refers to his mother and father as Mater and Pater, can't start the morning without marmalade and who uses such adjectives as "bally" in his epistles: "obey by name, obey by nature" as his nationalist schoolmate and bete noire refers to him.
Pater squanders the family fortune, Mater's name was "Maud and she was a great beauty. Also a first-rate shot." Maud also "had a certain reputation." His sister is beautiful but exceedingly highly-strung. Sam rebels against his idiosyncratic family by becoming resolutely normal: an excellent student and then one of the most sought-after lawyers in Colombo, and considered for one of the first judgeships ever offered to a "native".
Sam steadily moves up the ladder of society one rung at a time: he finally stands out form the crowd when he solves, or thinks he does, the "Hamilton Case", a murder that scandalizes island society, in a moment of brilliance. "Our Sherlock Holmes," the papers say. But it proves to be a Pyrrhic victory, setting his life on a course of a disappointment, soon eclipsed by the demagogue Donald Jayasinghe (who also happened to be his schoolmate and brother-in-law).
THE HAMILTON CASE is a story of personal and professional stagnation, of a man who turns his back on much of what he is, grasps at the straws of conventionality only to find that society moves off without him.
But it is far more than that. MICHELLE DE KRETSER sets up everything and everyone in contrast: Sam's father is open and generous, loved by all, while he gives his fortune away; Maud is flamboyant: Sam is conservative and bourgeois: all are, in many ways, plus anglais que les anglais. Sam adopts the Empire lock, stock and barrel, while Jayasinghe adopts everything Singhalese and drops his Tamil associates, all for political gain. Sam has marmalade for breakfast while his wife puts sambol on buttered toast.
Is de Kretser saying that Sri Lanka made up solely of incompatible opposites? The characters are like planets, each circling each other. But it is an unstable system: two planets lining up will cause a third to veer out of its orbit or even break up. Sam's orbit seems stable ... but it's decaying.
The book's structure also out of balance, unstable. The first third or so, up until the Hamilton case itself, is written in an idiosyncratic first person, as Sam's memoirs. de Kretser then switches abruptly to a conventional third person. The book ends with a 20-page epilogue in the form of a letter from one of Sam acquaintances to Sam's son.
And throughout it all is the almost palpable sense of place: "The household was woken at dawn by a bullet-like downpour that exhausted itself almost at once ... But an hour later the trees around the house were bowing until they groaned. The first drops of rain fell like far fish ..."
Sri Lanka is, or at least was -- I haven't been in a while -- a special and most singular place. Reading THE HAMILTON CASE was like going back.
And then ... and then, if monsoons and mangoes are not your cup of orange pekoe, there's always Maud and her "certain reputation. It was alleged that she once swam in a jungle pool wearing only her bloomers. Even though there were gentlemen and snakes present."
Peter Gordon
08/10/2003
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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