Mauritius in the early 1800s is the setting of Romesh's Gunesekera's new novel. Its heroine, 19-year-old Lucy Gladwell, arrives on the island wide-eyed and closed-minded, having prepared for Mauritius by reading miles of Lalla Rookh and other swooning poetry about princesses and their poet lovers.
Lucy moves in with her mildly sleazy uncle and an aunt who is persuaded she is at the top of the evolutionary ladder. The young woman finds that till she comes into her inheritance she will mostly loll about in an ivory-trimmed boudoir and direct the Indian indentured servants to put the potted plants in the right places. She is soon introduced to the French and British colonials, all playing at lords and ladies while their neighbour, the exiled Prince of Ceylon, lives in a cottage at the pleasure of the British, who conned him out of his legacy. The infantilism and inconsequential patter of this little society is meant to irritate the reader, I'm sure. The women amuse themselves while the men carry out the ugliest business in the world, slavery.
Infantile and pretentious
Unfortunately, Lucy is as infantile as the rest, obsessed with sentiment while making rather coltish pretences of being a free spirit, and it is hard to care about her. Her idea of being poetic seems to involve using the word “poetry” as often as possible. She would like flowers to grow untrammelled, not stand in rows. She wants horses to run about in the meadow, not race in an oval. Yet, she seems incapable of leaping into another human mind, or even communicating her own thoughts. Even hearing that slaves at the sugar mill have their hands cut off when they make a mistake, or that the rebel leader has been lynched and chopped up, fails to draw her out of her self-absorption.
Such sentimentality is an “affront to true suffering”, in the words of the ex-slave Amos. He is talking about a campaign by the French colonials to raise a monument in the botanical garden to fictional ill-fated lovers, but what he says might be a summary of this ultimately dissatisfying novel. Having lined up a society of slaves and masters and in-betweens, Gunesekara fails to bring them to life. The reader does not intuit the time period from the dialogue or the descriptions. Only the afterword clears up that mystery. The writing is full of stylistic flourishes, some enchanting, especially when the writer gets botanical, but many leaden.
Amos, who bought his freedom from his Syrian master, is strangely alienated from the “heathen” slaves and convicts on the island, but he is a more thoughtful man than the colonists. With him, Don Lambodar, interpreter to the Prince of Ceylon and the closest thing the novel has to a hero, can talk man to man. Lucy is captivated by her glimpses of Don Lambodar, and he is caught by her comeliness and direct gaze, perhaps. Being an interpreter, Don is necessarily a crafter of words. And in talking to and about Lucy he wallows in words. The two seldom have a normal conversation. She feels obliged to give him sharp, independent and free answers that make little sense. Her convictions, such as they are, express themselves as hauteur towards a Ceylonese man who works for a living, especially when she is capable of chattering sociably with her French neighbour or the Ceylonese minor royal Asoka. Whether or not Don is baffled at her irrational responses, we are.
Colonial code
Don frequently bumps into the colonial code. He has read the declarations of Western philosophers that all men are created free and equal but when he quotes that philosophy to George Huyton, he is surprised to face fury and bigotry instead of calm agreement. Has Huyton not read the books that he has on his own shelves, Don wonders. Who can answer this conundrum? And again, after Don rescues Lucy and her aunt from a naked, machete-swinging convict, the aunt looks forward to receiving his formal apology.
A rebellion of Indian indentured coolies and slaves rises and flashes, very briefly. A black woman is exiled for a white woman's crime. Meanwhile, Don Lambodar and Lucy, in the best Romantic tradition, raise imaginary obstacles to keep themselves apart. Truly, an affront.
The Prisoner of Paradise; Romesh Gunesekera, Bloomsbury, Rs 550
