Book: "Serpent in Paradise";
Author: Julian West;
Publishers: Atlantic Books, London; Price: 7.99 pounds
This
is a gripping story of love and murder, raw passion and brutal violence,
an extraordinary portrayal of what has gone wrong with Sri Lanka,
otherwise an island nation of picture postcard beauty. Using as the
backdrop a second blood-soaked insurrection that the Sinhalese Marxist
group JVP launched and the state's brutal response in 1989-90, a period
when Indian troops took on the Tamil Tigers elsewhere in Sri Lanka,
veteran war reporter Julian West unveils a captivating and racy saga in
her first work of fiction.
The story revolves around Eva, a photojournalist who returns to Sri
Lanka, the country of her birth, against the wishes of her mother who
clearly has secrets to hide. Eva sees the decaying house where she grew
up, and soon falls in love with a young Sinhalese man, Navahiru.
"She thought of him as a dark-skinned angel; as comforting as opium,
offering forgetfulness in place of turmoil. He was like the island. The
one she loved." They make plenty of love. "That night, they f----d in
the shower, their bodies rippling together like seals, and then again in
bed."
The times are bad though. The JVP, whose earlier insurrection in 1971
failed with the loss of thousands of young lives, is again on the
offensive, targeting and killing members of the security forces and
others it sees as class enemies. The government is singularly merciless,
and the bodies of young radicals show up everywhere. Innocents too get
killed aplenty. For Eva, there is plenty to shoot. But she is appalled.
Eva blames the savagery of the rebels, the police and the soldiers on
"the erosion of older, gentler village values".
And then comes Carl, an American journalist based in Colombo who falls
for Eva head over heels. He strikes a friendship with her but finds
Navahiru a stumbling block. Casually, he shares his predicament with
Captain, a young Sinhalese officer of the Special Forces - "a good
source of girls...stories and information". Even as Eva reciprocates
Carl's feelings, armed gunmen seize Navahiru who gets mixed up with JVP
radicals - and Eva is shattered.
Terror then takes over. Carl feels guilty. Like thousands in Sri Lanka
driven to despair, Eva frantically hunts for Navahiru, using all her
contacts, going to the extent of faking an interview to ask the powerful
interior minister ("Close up, he had the pasty skin and open pores of a
sensualist and a drinker"), the man who presides over the government
death squads. Finally, Navahiru's fate is what many suffered at that
time.
Eva is shattered, but by then her affair with Carl is intense - although
questions do crop up in her mind about the American's military friends.
Carl takes a relief ship to the Tamil north, ignoring Eva's requests to
take her along, and almost gets killed in a killer cyclone. By and by
Eva also realises why her mother, Vivien, did not want her to fly to Sri
Lanka: she discovers her real father.
"Serpent in Paradise" does not touch upon the LTTE war except in
passing: "The north was only 250 miles away, but it could have been
another country, another century...Now it was in the hands of the
rebels, with their Disneyland iconography and pastry-cutter ideology.
They were childish, but like any child with power (and many were
children), they were deadly."
But Sri Lanka comes alive in the book. The portrayal of Colombo, of the
towns, of the streets, of the rural landscape, of the military press
officer ("a rat-faced colonel with red eyes, who offered tea and lies"),
of the terror, everything is as real as it can get. Is this work of
fiction based on a real life story?
December 27,
2007
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