CINNAMON GARDENS

An ambitious, often moving, but ultimately unsatisfying second novel’set in the former Ceylon in the 1920s—by the Sri Lankan—born (now Canadian) author (Funny Boy, 1996). Selvadurai’s frustratingly lax narrative juxtaposes two personal stories of oppression and lost opportunities that reflect the experience of their homeland (“a complex society with numerous horizontal and vertical divisions”), poised between colonization by the British and separate (and opposed) religious faiths (Hindu and Tamil) and independence movements. Annalukshmi Kandiah is a spirited young woman who prefers her teaching career in a mission school, and her friendships with a freethinking teacher and the latter’s ward, to her father’s plans to arrange her marriage. Annalukshmi’s Uncle Balendran has been even more rigidly controlled by his father, the Mudliyar Navaratnam, a British-appointed official whose estate his son dutifully manages, 20 years after the Mudliyar had “rescued” Balendran from a homosexual relationship, steering him into marriage, and respectability. Selvadurai moves confidently among these major characters and their numerous relations and acquaintances, most of whom live in comparative luxury in the upper-class “Cinnamon Gardens” section of the city of Colombo—and are variously affected by the spirit of rebellion seeping slowly into their hitherto complacent, enclosed little world. But the story is mired in complicated, overextended exposition—its characters’ byzantine personal, political, and religious affiliations require a good deal of sorting out—and we’re rushed rather too summarily through an otherwise very moving double climax, in which Annalukshmi at last understands and accepts the consequences of her defiance, and Balendran finds the courage to emerge from his father’s domineering shadow. An impressive near-miss. Selvadurai appears to be still learning his craft, but his gifts for compassionate characterization and clarity of statement augur well, and suggest that this very interesting new writer may be on the verge of producing major work.