Fiction: One man's life as told through the course of a novel can hardly be described as new territory. It is a theme that has dominated fiction since the birth of the novel form. For all the stories inspired by conflict and war, the personal has always overshadowed the public.
Countless novels have looked to an individual life as a way of exploring the wider relevance of existence. Things are as they are. The convincing articulation of this fact is but one of the reasons explaining not only the appeal but the artistic success of Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera's graceful fourth novel, The Match, in which he gives new energy to what is a long-established theme: times past and one man's journey.
Before even looking to the story, Gunesekera, a writer who has the mind of a poet and the eye of a painter, makes effective use of a quote from the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, which explains not only the art of photography but the impulse behind the act: "Shooting a picture is holding your breath . . ." A photograph freezes a moment; it also establishes memory. And memory is a defining element of experience, of existence, just as the act of taking a photograph in this book is not only a job, it is an attempt at survival.
In this most beautiful and atmospheric of novels, Gunesekera recaptures the magic of his outstanding second novel, The Sandglass (1998), a meditation on time and death which itself had fulfilled the artistry evident in his debut, Reef (1994). The Match, which is both contemporary and period, flares into a multi-textured realism through its melancholic, gentle humour and the brilliant creation of a character named Sunny Fernando, the son of an unhappy pianist mother and a lapsed journalist father whose career did not so much end as taper off into inactivity.
Sunny is that familiar Everyman character, yet another Bloom, and more importantly, yet another human adrift in the small world of his immediate life. All that happens is defined for him by the early death, when he is only eight years old, of his remote mother, a woman "with the striking features of a thirties screen idol" who taught piano to other children but never to him. "What he found difficult to understand was her bizarre decision to draw into their house dozens of freakish children in an effort to develop their musical abilities, while at the same time assuming that he, like his father, had none."
Without striking the slightest note of sentimentality, Gunesekera evokes the dignified heartbreak of the small boy and the tragedy contained in the realisation that "he came to believe that in death she was much closer to him and safe from distractions". Her exit leaves him totally dependent on his father, Lester. Their common ground is cricket, the closest they come to shared emotion. As the narrative evolves, cricket also assumes a central importance, not only as a passion but as a symbol of cultural cohesion. There are shades of VS Naipaul, without the cynicism, without the ego.
Gunesekera's lightness of touch enables him to evoke intense feeling without losing narrative flow. He fills the story with episodes from daily life and an almost physical sense of the island in which the early sequences are set. In time, as expected, young Sunny heads for London as a student, where "Manila, those bittersweet years of wavering adolescence, faded into a dream".
Observations such as this consolidate the mood of time passing. In England, Sunny quickly discovers that engineering is not for him. He turns to his father's old pal, Hector, for advice and so cues one of many wonderful comments made by Hector, in ways the heart of the book: "Adolescence has never been part of our culture."
At no time does Sunny become the standard artist-as-outsider figure - Gunesekera is too subtle for that. Instead he surrounds his young non-heroic hero with interesting characters. One of them, Ranil, has a father who had come to England to study medicine in Liverpool, and had stayed. On hearing this, an impressed Sunny remarks "a doctor?", only to be informed: "He's actually an undertaker. He failed, you see." The obvious is consistently bypassed. Years pass, Sunny eventually finds love with one of his circle and becomes a father and a man who never quite manages to exert himself sufficiently at anything. This is Goncharov's Oblomov brought forward to the 21st century.
All of this is brilliantly handled. With time, Sunny also learns what really happened to the mother he had been told had simply died. Pieces slowly fit together. Daily living, its dreams and its failures, the telling asides, comes to life. Grace and truth and humour inform this mature vibrant narrative. Gunesekera is in full control without ever appearing calculating. All the while there is a sense of outside events and change gathering momentum. Many writers have used newsreel detail to place a story artificially within the context that becomes history. Gunesekera's use of the topical and historical is never laboured .
Before he knows it, Sunny has been away from Sri Lanka for more than 25 years. It is time for him to revisit his home. He does this alone, without his love, Clara, whom he has never married, and their son. Just as he was the child of parents who hardly knew him, he develops into a father who suddenly realises he does not know his own son, whose childhood has simply slipped away.
Blair's England is seen in full flow. But Sunny is no speech-maker; polemic does not interest him. His mildness is one of the strengths of what is an astutely crafted feat of characterisation. Sunny's photographic business rises and falters, but he continues taking pictures and retains his passion for cricket and also for his old notions of romance.
The Match is an organic, mature novel conveying truths and inhabiting its own vivid world. To read it is to enter it and actively experience it. Here is an obvious Booker contender that does not strike one as written for Booker. Subtle and convincing, it is life as art, art as life. Gunesekera is gifted and possessed of a rare humility. He has written an engaging, appealing, universal and hopeful book that not only shows what fiction can do, it shows why fiction is written - and read.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Match By Romesh Gunesekera Bloomsbury, 307pp. £14.99
