A PASSAGE NORTH

Arudpragasam, whose first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, made a critical splash in 2016, is back with an intelligent, quite often moving novel of meditation and aftermath.

The plot of this book, conventionally speaking, would fit on a cocktail napkin: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man who lives in the southern city of Colombo and works for a nongovernmental organization there, receives a phone call; takes a long walk, during which he stops to smoke a few cigarettes; makes the titular train journey into the recently war-ravaged north, during which he recalls a love affair now over; attends a village funeral. That's it. And yet the novel is charged throughout with tension and excitement. Part of that derives from Arudpragasam's fierce intelligence and his total commitment to plumbing Krishan's psyche, to following his thoughts patiently, relentlessly, with exquisite subtlety. Not many writers can successfully invite comparison to W.G. Sebald's slow, inward, thoughtful—yet somehow pulse-pounding—novels, but Arudpragasam can and does. The rest of the novel's tension comes from the powerfully evoked historical context. This isn't just the aftermath of a love now over, or of a young man's idealistic early 20s, or even of the life of a grandmother's caretaker now dead in what appears to be an accidental fall down a well (the funeral to which Krishan is headed); beneath them all, agitating the water to which the book returns again and again, is the long, still-rippling wake of Sri Lanka's bloody three-decade civil war, in which the grandmother's caretaker, Rani, lost both her sons (and in which Krishan's father was killed). The result, if such a thing be possible, is a novel of philosophic suspense, one whose reader shivers in anticipation not of what will happen next but of where the next thought will lead.

A luminously intelligent, psychologically intricate novel—slow in always rewarding ways.