The Sandglass, by Romesh Gunesekerah
As with all his work, The Sandglass is a seemingly simple tale, in this case of two families and their effects on each other over the decades, beginning with the purchase by Jason Ducal of a part of the land once belonging to the Vatunases -- a portion sold by Buttons, the patriarch of the clan, to spite his son, who is determined to get it back, as he is determined to control all around him -- as a home for he and his wife Pearl, and traced down through the birth of their great-granddaughter. The novel actually opens with the death of Pearl, and the return of her son Prins to England from Sri Lanka, from which the family had come and to which he had returned in attempting to escape what he felt was their pointless existence in England. From this point on, the narration relays the struggle to put everything in perspective, to understand the past and how the various members of the families have ended up at the crossroads they find themselves and their respective countries facing now. Convinced that his father's death in 1956 was not, as the official report states, accidental but an assassination, Prins is determined to find out the facts about his father's life and the reasons why his mother abandoned Arcadia, their home in Sri Lanka to move to England.
Told through the first-person narration of his friend Chip who had, in the intervening years, come to know Pearl better than anyone in her own family, what both Prins and we discover is that to look for such answers is to discover the web of all the tales that surround us, and how the many meanings of the words we use create and shape the meanings of our lives, as well as how we view those around us.
Having read both his story collection, Monkfish Moon, and his first novel, Reef, it seemed to me there was a subtle shift in his style in the earlier portions of this novel; some places it seemed to be a bit more of a crisp, almost noir-ish feel to some of the writing, an almost brutal simplicity here and there, offset by other places where it had a restrained by powerful lyricism -- much in the manner of the best of the hard-boiled detective school (Hammett, Chandler and, more recently, Ross MacDonald)... which would be rather fitting as the structure subtly reflects that, as well (especially MacDonald), as it is something of a detective story in its own right, and it also bears some of that same "hopeful cynicism" in tone. I've no idea whatsoever whether Gunesekerah has even read any of the writers mentioned above, and certainly the prose doesn't show any direct influence ... but I see similarities to some of the strengths of these writers. Regardless, it's his own novel all the way ... he owes nobody where that's concerned.
And I remain impressed by his deceptively easy control of his tale, such as the way he handles things with the penultimate chapter, "Dawn" ... there are some passages here that are almost heartbreakingly beautiful, yet in bringing in the birth of the child at the very point when there is such intense despair, he ran the risk of lapsing into sentimentality ... and pulled it off without ever falling into that... and then recast it all again by the final section, taking what could have so easily been a hopeful, upbeat but slightly false ending and making it instead simply one movement in the dance of life ... neither the most nor the least important.
As I've said elsewhere, he loves to tackle the big issues: Life, death, love, loneliness, alienation, what it means to be a displaced person both in your own country and elsewhere.... all done with a quiet, simple dignity that avoids making any of his characters pitiful, but is full of pathos and meaning and, as with all his work that I've read, rich in layers and such a skillful handling of metaphor that it can easily go unnoticed. To put it simply: The man is good!
