Love and war in paradise

Known in colonial days and for decades after independence as Ceylon, the island nation of Sri Lanka, poised like a brilliant jewel off the southernmost tip of India, impressed many of its visitors and inhabitants as a kind of earthly paradise, with its beautiful beaches, lush vegetation, jungles, refreshingly cooler uplands and innumerable species of wildlife.

But for decades now, violent strife between ethnic groups (the majority Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, and the minority Tamils, who are Hindus) has transformed this once-peaceful Eden into an intermittent war zone.

The London-based writer Romesh Gunesekera, who won critical praise for his short story collection “Monkfish Moon” (1992) and his two previous novels, “Reef” (1994) and “The Sandglass” (1998), was born in Sri Lanka in 1954. His feeling for the intense natural beauty of his native land is palpable in every phrase of his lyrical and inventive prose style, and runs like a silver thread through the dark territory he explores in his new novel, “Heaven’s Edge.”

Although set in a time and place that are deliberately left indefinite, this novel’s central themes -- war and peace, violence and nonviolence -- are timeless and timely. Indeed, too close a knowledge of the particulars of Sri Lankan politics might even get in the way of understanding and appreciating the quasi-mythological quality of this novel.

The narrator and hero is a young man named Marc who leaves his safe life in London to return to the dangerous, war-torn island that meant so much to his father and grandfather, both now dead. The story seems to unfold sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps some 30 years from now. The depressed, exhausted-looking place where Marc first comes ashore is a far cry from the verdant, colorful paradise kept alive in his imagination by his grandfather’s stories. The island has become a realm of fear, silence and poverty, where nameless warlords impose a reign of arbitrary brutality that is more like chaos than order.

Although Gunesekera is clearly evoking the landscape, climate and topography of Sri Lanka, he is intentionally less specific about the political history that has reduced this paradise to so sorry a state. (Indeed, the real-life Sri Lankan government and Tamil rebels have agreed to a cease-fire, which, one hopes, may be a harbinger of better things.)

Setting off alone to explore the jungle, Marc comes upon a beautiful young woman named Uva, who explains to him what has happened to this country: “War here, like everywhere else, was once about land and identity. But after the death cloud in the south everything changed. You see, we were reshaped by gangsters into new collectives held together only by conscription.... Not language, not religion, not any of those outmoded notions of nation. After so many years of fighting, violence became ingrained into our way of life. So now we have only thugs for politicians and tyranny in every tribe.”

Uva has dedicated herself to saving and nurturing the many varieties of animals and plants that have been decimated by the war and are still being threatened by a regime that seems determined to wipe out subsistence farming, wildlife and any human being who shows signs of independent life.

Marc and Uva fall in love, but their Edenic idyll is shattered when soldiers burst into their sanctuary. Next thing, Marc awakens in a hospital, where a metal tag has been inserted into his earlobe. Recovering from his wounds, he slips into the underworld of the city, where he manages to locate Uva’s kindhearted, if frivolous friend Jaz, an engaging, outstandingly epicene male prostitute. There too he meets Kris, a taciturn metal worker with a knack for all things mechanical, and the three men become unlikely companions in a dangerous escape to the countryside. Marc is determined to find Uva, although he cannot be sure she is still alive.

Throughout his terrifying adventures, Marc grapples constantly with the increasingly baffling question of violence: When, if ever, is it justified?

Indeed, the question obsessed him even before he left his peaceful home in London. Marc’s grandfather Eldon, who preached the gospel of pacifism, was profoundly saddened and dismayed when his own son Lee, Marc’s father, chose to return to the island as a fighter pilot. There he met his death. Now Eldon is dead too. Although Marc has been more influenced by the old man who raised him, he also believes that his father’s intentions were genuinely altruistic.

Both men, he feels sure, meant well, but which of them was right? Gunesekera portrays Marc’s dilemma in one riveting scene after another. Early on, he catches sight of a pair of buffaloes awkwardly trying to mate:

“Then, behind the animals, a troop of soldiers appeared, jeering. They fired a few shots into the huddle. The male keeled over and the cow bolted, ripping the skin of her belly.

“I have never easily been one easily angered, but my blood began to rise. If I had a gun, I suppose I would have used it. Then I remembered my grandfather piously quoting a pundit of his youth, ‘Violence can only condemn you to more violence.’ I understood that, but in my head I also heard my dead father, Lee, retort, ‘Sometimes doing nothing condemns you more.’ The soldiers fired again, and went after the cow.”

Over and over, as he and his companions flee for their lives, Marc is forced to ponder the questions: How can I defend myself and those I love against harm? How can one help the weak and innocent against the strong and ruthless? How does one distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable killing? How can one wage war against the violent and the brutal without allowing violence to become a way of life? Gunesekera’s vivid prose and his keen powers of description and imagination show us how the hard answers come to Marc, not only after long consideration but also through harrowing experiences felt on the very pulses of his being.

*

Heaven’s Edge

A Novel

Romesh Gunesekera

Grove Press: 234 pp., $24